Table of Contents:
Introduction: Soundings/Sightings
Chapter 1: Writing Women: Problematics of History and Language
Chapter 3: Hedging in Men and Women: The Margins as Agents of Gender Construction
Chapter 4: Edging Out Difference: Revisiting the Margins as a Postmodern Project
Chapter 4: Edging Out Difference: Revisiting the Margins as a Post Modern Project
"This study is not . . . a treatise on the rights of women, nor an inquiry into the basis of feminism. It is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference. . . . In comparing the way in which they have dramatized sex-difference, it is possible to gain a greater insight into what elements are social constructs, originally irrelevant to the biological facts of sex-gender."Mead, 1935, ix
"I concluded that, until we could understand very thoroughly the way in which a society could mold all the men and women born within it to approximate an ideal of behavior which was congenial to only a few of them, or could limit one sex to an ideal of behavior which another culture succeeded in limiting to the opposite sex, we wouldn't be able to talk very intelligently about sex differences."
"Masculine-Feminine: ... This structure leans on the alibi of biological organs (the reduction of sex as difference to the difference of the sexual organs); and, above all, it is pegged to the grandiose cultural models whose function it is to separate the sexes in order to establish the absolute privilege of one over the other."Baudrillard, 1970 (tr. 1981, 99)
Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations? ... The masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only the exclusive framework in which that specificity can be recognized, but in every other way the "specificity" of the feminine is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both constitute "identity" and make the singular notion of identity a misnomer."Butler, 1990, 4
The first of a facing pair of prefatory pages to the Psalms in a book made for King Louis X "Le Hutin" places his first wife's patron saint, Margaret, on the dexter side of two female saints, with her family shield of Burgundy and allianced houses in the adjacent margins (fig. 1).
 Fig. 4.1 |
The Project
Post-modern theories can be used to pressure the easy conclusion reached in the last chapter whereby the programs of the margins coincided with medieval ideas about binary sexual identities. In Christian ideology, gender was performative, but a major component of that performance was sexual behavior (including abstinence), and this was controlled by an increasingly rigid moral system, framed by a heterosexual imperative. The tyranny of the margins coincided with a historical moment when these moral systems were being strenuously enforced, and this chapter is in part about such social and political boundaries. But was it a mistaken bias on my part to have examined these books and their recipients only in terms of heterosexuality, thereby perpetuating a focus on gender polarity? To advance our understanding of these hegemonies, a "thick description" of that moment, including the reading/viewing community and their books, is warranted, in concert with newer notions of difference. My agenda, as defined by Russo in relation to the grotesque, is to use historical inquiry "to understand the complexity of treating signifying systems and 'events' together," and to deepen an understanding of "dialogical laughter." 2
Using "triangulation" as I defined it in the Introduction, first a broader and deeper historical narrative, and then a consideration of modern and postmodern gender theory, will converge to bring home the historical contingency of the heterosexual imperative. I will also suggest why it may have operated so strongly in the early fourteenth century. It will then also become possible to search for subversive elements, following a logic outlined by Scott more than a decade ago (Scott 1067-1068). As if following her blue print, in the last chapter I demonstrated that: "As a constitutive element of social relationships, . . . gender involves . . . culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations -- Eve and Mary as symbols of woman, for example." The case study also followed the path she outlined in that I found: "These symbols (were) interpreted according to "normative concepts . . . that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. These concepts (were) expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal, and political doctrines and typically take the form of a fixed binary opposition, categorically and unequivocally asserting the meaning of male and female, masculine and feminine." This chapter will probe along the lines of her statement that: "In fact, these normative statements depend on the refusal or repression of alternative possibilities, and, sometimes, overt contests about them taking place . . .. Subsequent history [such as my last chapter] is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict."
Recent changes in gender theory, especially the branch known as queer theory, have even more fundamentally challenged the notion of sex/gender difference, enabling historians to recognize binary polarity as a recurrent imperative in western culture, rather than a natural state. Mead and Baudrillard formulated their notions of gender construction on the Marxist premise that "our" hegemonic binary sex/gender system is coincident with western capitalism. Laqueur's hypothesis of a two-sex model could be said to fit this premise, since he places its formation around the time of the industrial revolution (Laqueur, 149-154). The historical patterns, however, are more complex than this would suggest. Feminist scholars have had to wrestle with the problem that, deconstructed in this way, "women" may disappear as a category for study. Cultural studies have continued to acknowledge hegemonies based on contingent notions of difference that amount to a polarity between self and "other;" assuming a mature white male self, women then take a place alongside people of other races, classes, and even ages. It is no coincidence that the definition of these oppressed groups is also part of recent legal discourse, for the purpose of defining discrimination. Yet we are beginning to understand that the oppressor is also a loser in hegemonic systems. 3
Understanding the means by which the category "women" was constructed and maintained can enable a sharper understanding of the present, and deter the category of "men" from enacting its continuation, and "women" from colluding with it. To advance the feminist project, therefore, it has become imperative to historicize. As in chapter two, by looking at the construction of masculinity as well as of femininity, I can deconstruct the notion that lies behind the category "oppressor" to indicate the multivalence of "men" and, above all, that the oppressor is also oppressed (as also Rhode, 200-201). The doer is an elusive agent, and we do not have to point a finger at one class of people or another (men, rulers, clergy, etc.) if we re-enlist the notion of ideological work in which every aspect of the society and culture participated. 4 The young bride who colludes by accepting her subordinate role, and later as a mother or mother-in-law who foists it on another young bride, participates as much in the hegemonic construction of gender as does her husband or her confessor. The young man who sacrifices his shining locks to deny his femininity, whether as cleric or knight, also colludes with gender ideology.
Social History and Difference: The Fourteenth-Century Viewing Community
It has long been a popular notion that the fourteenth century is some sort of "distant mirror" for our own, a "calamitous century" and an "age of adversity." 5 A few years ago Eco's best-selling postmodern novel succeeded in so confusing the boundaries between "them" and "us" that William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes seemed to use the same mental processes in seeking causes. 6 Recent interest in the Black Death (bubonic plague), which decimated the population of Europe in 1347-51, may have been piqued by the AIDS epidemic (though the diseases function very differently). In fact there is a long list of medieval calamities, many of which lie well beyond our range of experience, and which are only now being fully described from documentary sources (Jordan; Nirenberg).
The sainted king who had led the French to the crusades twice, died during
the second, in 1270, after a crushing defeat known as the Sicilian Vespers,
a defeat that the Church of Rome and the west European powers never fully
recovered from. They did not stop fighting for long, but turned their
aggression inward, to civil war. A climate change known as "the little
ice age" caused crop failures, with famine and weakening of the population.
Recent medical understanding of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) warrants
the conclusion that when summers were as sunless as winters, the population
would also have suffered from depression and anxiety; and the imposition
of rigid systems of class and gender may have been an unconscious strategy to
fend off anxiety by creating barriers against chaos. 7 Commodification of basic food supplies compounded
the problems created for the poor by food shortages. Peasant revolts were
severely put down, and as the century wore on, the class gap widened even in armaments; by 1380 peasants with
pitchforks fought against the new powerful crossbows rather than swords.
Conflicts within the Church culminated in the Great Schism, when the Pope
in Rome had a rival holding court in Avignon (1378-1417), and secular
princes declared for one or the other, dividing up the map of Europe.
Throughout the century movements that centered on Apocalyptism flared
up and were suppressed; they explained the travails of this "evil age,"
while various self-proclaimed prophets and angels promised the immediate
coming of better times. 8 Groups and individuals were tried and burned as heretics
in greater numbers than ever before, and such accusations even factored
in the rivalry between religious orders. Women's history writes the period
as one of downward turns in the status of the female half of the population
-- in education, inheritance, right to rule, validation of sexual enjoyment,
freedom to move about, risk of death in childbirth. Yet a men's history has to recount the toll taken
by warfare (even sometimes by jousting or hunting), political rivalry,
accusations of heresy and homosexuality, or back-breaking physical work.
The savagery of those in power was as fiercely turned on fellow men as
on women, in line with the general precept that "men have historically
held themselves to ideals of masculinity as unrealistic and coercive as
anything they have imposed on women." 9 The failure of the Crusades was often blamed on the
sinfulness of the Crusaders, or of Christians at large; earlier writers
had particularly emphasized the temperance and humility required of a
 Figure 3.31 |
 Figure 3.39 |
 Figure 3.40 |
 Figure 3.41 |
 Figure 3.44 |
 Figure 3.2 |
 Figure 3.35 |
 Figure 3.9 |
One of the early Flemish books examined here, a psalter and prayer book (2mm), was made for Guy de Dampierre as Count of Flanders, whose arms are depicted in it, some time after 1280. 16 Images of combat in the margins, absent from a typical earlier book (1m), resonate with the Sicilian Vespers, and the role of the House of Flanders in the conflicts of this time. Another psalter from the 1270s or 80s connected with a crusading family, the Psalter of Yolande of Soissons (New York, Morgan Library, MS M729), has tournaments between grotesque knights and beasts in the margins that might refer to anxieties about her father's and husband's military campaigns; her father may have died on Louis IX's second crusade. 17 The battles Philippe le Bel waged between 1297 and 1304 against the Flemish armies are remembered much later, in a standard battle scene in a recension of the Grandes Chroniques de France made for Jeanne d'Amboise and her husband, Guillaume Flote after their marriage in 1339; both had an ancestor killed in these campaigns (Hedeman, 83, Pl. 3). In the Flemish psalter, the arms of Guy's third son, Baudouin, who had died on crusade in 1270 are included with those of his brothers on f. 7v; after death the arms were memorials. And Randall convincingly glossed some of the obscenities as political satire, slandering the Count's enemies as pricks (ch 3: Randall, 1960). The grotesques in combat may also denigrate the enemy, while keeping the knightly owner aware of his bellicose duties. A manuscript of the prose Lancelot illuminated by the same artisans for Guy's son Guillaume de Termonde has an ape bearing his arms jousting at a mermaid below-text, a parody of the noble knights Lancelot and Mordret in the main frame. 18 It was also in this period that the treatise for the right behavior of princes known as the Secreta secretorum (i.e. on the secrets of good rule) was translated into Flemish by Jacob van Maerlant (c. 1235-c. 1300; Nicholas, 146). 19
The exact date of the Dampierre manuscript can be narrowed by the heraldry displayed in it. His arms are those of the Count of Flanders, but neither of his wives' arms is depicted. The book should date after 1280 when his mother Marguerite of Flanders died having ruled Flanders in her own right, and before 1297 when his second wife Isabelle of Luxembourg, Countess of Namur, died leaving Guy the county; after that date he added a label to his arms. 20 Married first to Mahaud of Béthune in 1245 and then to Isabelle in 1265, with barely a year as a widower, Guy de Dampierre had thirteen children, and was over sixty years old when the psalter was made for him. Despite the loss of two sons he had provided ample heirs, and as his second wife reached menopause he might have been counseled to live chastely. Some of the female grotesques explicitly warn against the wiles of women like Salome (fig. ch. 3.31, 32).
 Figure 3.32 |
France in the early years of the next century was more peaceful. Enguerran de Marigny was among those in high standing at the French court who discouraged the king from launching another crusade, helping negotiate peace with the Flemish and building splendid palaces and chapels (Gillerman, 11-16). A very lavish royal display was put on in Paris at Pentecost in 1313 for the knighting of Philippe le Bel's sons and others, including de Marigny's son Louis. There was considerable expenditure on the plastic arts, and the event marked the inauguration of the king's new palace on the Ile de la Cité. A richly illuminated manuscript of the Apocalypse was prepared for Isabelle, who had returned to Paris for the occasion (Lewis). The levy necessitated to meet these expenses was not raised in the king's life time (Brown 1992, 188-207).
Philippe le Bel had been at pains to raise his sons to be good rulers and to marry them for maximum advantage (Brown 1988 & 1992, 11-33). In the last chapter we examined some of the messages conveyed to them by Giles of Rome's Livre du Gouvernement des Rois (fig. ch.3.1).
 Figure 3.1 |
In France, under secular jurisdiction, execution was also a common penalty
for sexual "crimes," whether for homosexual men and women, for rapists,
or for adulterers. 25 In addition to those of the Templars, other brutal
executions were carried out in Paris in 1314: Philippe's three sons' wives,
Marguerite de Bourgogne and her cousins, the sisters Jeanne d'Artois and
Blanche de Bourgogne, were accused of adulterous affairs of such catastrophic
import that, according to one poet, they were accompanied by a double
eclipse of the sun and moon (Lehugeur, 16-18, 168-69). 26 Their lovers were castrated, executed, and their
bodies dragged through the streets. Their sins were doubly offensive because
they had made love on high feast days (
 Figure 3.3 |
Figure 4.1 |
 Figure 3.10 |
Figure 3.3 |
 Figure 3.4 |
What did the antics of apes have to do with Louis le Hutin and the Marguerite affair? These were multivalent beasts in the period and grew to such popularity as decoration that (too) much has been made of the term "babuinare" introduced later in the century to describe the process of decorating with grotesques in general. 35 In this period the valence of apes is likely to be negative. The story of the usurper, Fauvel, a political and moral satire that seems to have been directed at Louis, described the decorations of his throne and hall in terms that fit such marginalia: There are brightly colored animals and serpents, and wall paintings of monkeys and foxes (Gillerman, 17; Rosener et al, 53). 36 In the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg, apes lurk in the foliage behind the fool of Psalm 52, with hounds, conys and a fox; two of them joust, riding a lion and a billy goat (f. 83v: Avril, Pl. 18A). In another book of this period an ape capturing a bird appears beneath the arrest of Christ. 37
 Figure 4.3 |
 Figure 3.37 |
About the time of Louis le Hutin's premature death (at twenty-seven) the following year, a group at the court in Paris was executing a much more sumptuous and ambitious illuminated book than the psalter in Tournai, the famous Fauvel manuscript, satirizing his reign (Rosener et. al). 41
 Figure I.1 |
 Figure 3.12 |
Figure 3.35 |
 Figure 3.36 |
 Figure 3.38 |
The divisions of the psalms in the Peterborough Psalter are marked by the usual initials, many with Davidic scenes, but the text is framed by leafy trellises supporting numerous secular figures -- musicians, maidens, knights, and hunters -- as well as birds and beasts. Freaks are compressed into the line endings on many pages (fig. 3.34).
 Figure 3.34 |
Louis le Hutin's posthumous son, Jean, died in infancy, and he otherwise left only one legitimate daughter, Jeanne (later of Navarre), whose book of hours will be examined with those of her contemporaries. Louis le Hutin was succeeded by his brothers, but the catastrophes augmented. During the short reign of Philippe le Long (1316-22) the Great Famine caused extreme hardship throughout Europe -- in fact for a full biblical seven years counting from 1315 (Jordan, 7-8). As a general reflection, the calendar pictures of the "normal" rich harvests -- hay in June, grain in July and August, grapes in September, hogs in November -- must have become vectors for prayers to end the rains and crop failures, taking on an aura of magical wish-fulfillment. The dragons and wyverns that hem in the prayers in many books of this period resonate with the scourge wielded by Death in a contemporary manuscript of the Biblia Pauperum from Erfurt (fig. 3.23):
 Figure 3.23 |
Marginalia, being without/outside a text are predictably multivalent. For instance several associations can be suggested for the great numbers of birds of all kinds in the margins of some of the books made in these years (notably the Psalter of Louis le Hutin, the Breviary of Blanche of France, and the Hours of Jeanne de Savoie, Tables 2, 3). We might ponder them in light of the thought frequently expressed in the chronicles of the famine years that "not even the birds of spring heralded hope" (Jordan, 8); these remarkably naturalistic images of recognizable varieties of north European birds perhaps presaging our modern preoccupation with disappearing species.
 Figure 3.15 |
During the Great Famine stricter morality was imposed, in fear of God's
anger. This gave the Dominicans their chance to pursue heresy, becoming
the "hounds of the lord" in a popular pun (
A Franciscan Breviary now in the Vatican was made for one of the princesses born to Philippe and Jeanne (1fr). 54 In 1315, a year after her mother's disgrace in the adultery scandal and the year before her father succeeded to the throne, the teenage Princess Blanche entered the Franciscan house of Longchamp, where she took her vows in 1318. Feasts for St. Louis of Toulouse and for Corpus Christi, which were adopted by the order in 1317 and 1319, are included without illustrations in an appendix of "special offices," where they are described as new (ff. 506, 521v; Morand, 47-48). It is, therefore, likely that the breviary was prepared for Blanche's use after her entry into her new life as a bride of Christ, and completed by 1320. Occasional rubrics or instructions in French indicate that she was still not entirely comfortable in Latin.
The lavish decoration, which includes historiated capitals or small pictures at the beginning of each psalter division or office and marginalia on most folios, is attributed by Morand to four artists including Jean Pucelle (figs. 3 and ch. 3.15). This book thus inaugurates, in our series, the exquisite new style that renders physical things with great verisimilitude. The colors, however, are very lightly applied through much of the book, the pale rose, buff, and yellow anticipating the palette of the Waddesdon Psalter, also made for a nun. (figs 3.14a,b,c) The general tenor of the decoration appears light-hearted, yet an array of beautiful boys engaged in the labors of the months is more than off-set by the great number of male grotesques, basilisks, and chimeras that infest the other pages. Many of the grotesques are less than half human, having only heads grafted onto bestial bodies, often without the garments that normally cover the seam; in this they are like the ones in the Psalter of Louis le Hutin (fig. 3.4).
Figure 3.4 |
Some allusions to sexual impropriety in the Breviary of Blanche de France seem more suited to a married woman than to a nun: A terrier chases a cony up a tree in the scene for May, an indication of sexual taboo as used later in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux (see ch. 3). The readings for the first Sunday in September are surrounded by hares and hounds, and coquettish grotesques, perhaps for a similar reason. The readings from the prophets include Osee 1: 2 "... and the Lord said to Osee: Go, take thee a wife of fornications, and have of her children [sons] of fornications: for the land by fornication shall depart from the Lord." The illustration shows the prophet embracing a woman with green hair; he holds her round the neck rather aggressively while her hand moves down to his waist; male and female grotesques confront each other in the bottom of the page (fig. 3). Blanche could not forget her mother's transgressions, though they did not prevent her sisters from being married off to advance her father's claims to land (Marguerite married the Count of Flanders in 1320 as part of a peace settlement, see Table 1).
Morand dated the colorful Hours of Jeanne de Savoie (6fl) about 1320 on
the basis of style (p. 47). This book was made for a distant cousin of
Blanche's who later (in 1329) married Jean III, duc de Bretagne. Jeanne's
mother was the Blanche de Bourgogne who had married Edouard de Savoie
in 1307, and who owned the fragment of a Book of Hours now in the Beinecke Library. 56 Louis le Hutin's first wife, Marguerite, was her
mother's sister (Table 1). Jeanne kneels in prayer in three initials,
and a knight bearing the arms of Savoie (
 Figure 4.4 |
Figure 4.5 |
A number of the prayers to saints were particularly apt for a girl contemplating
marriage: The virgin saints are invoked to help overcome dangers and weakness
(
 Figure 4.6 |
 Figure 4.2 |
 Figure 4.7 |
The somewhat later Taymouth Hours (5fl), from England, also seems to have been made for a queen or princess. The richly dressed crowned woman who appears four times (ff. 7, 18, 118v, 139), once accompanied by an older man without a crown and once with a young crowned man, has been tentatively identified by Harthen and James as Joan of the Tower, the fifth and last child of Edward II and Isabelle of France, who was born in 1321 and married in 1328 to the four-year-old king of Scotland, David II. 58 Other candidates are Philippa of Hainault, who married Joan's brother that year, or Queen Isabelle herself. 59 Circumstantial evidence makes some such association likely, but no heraldry or documents prove it. I prefer to think the book was a wedding gift, probably from Isabelle to one of the young brides, since the unusual subjects were evidently designed to modify her behavior. However, it provides an example of a very different didactic model from the French books, even though there are pictorial echoes from the French group associated with Pucelle (for instance in the Annunciation, f. 60). The bulk of the illuminations are in a robust, colorful style with aggressive modeling that activates draperies, whereas the Annunciation pictures are more subtle compositions, with softer colors and shading indicating spatial depth (ff. 59v-60, fig. 3.7).
 Figure 3.7 |
The life of St. Francis indicates a connection with the friars, and the unusual scene of the saint cutting out his own habit provides a gender-reversed model for the young owner (f. 180v). There are few marginalia (except on ff. 183-189), but its under-text narratives, replete with Anglo-Norman labels, use many of the motifs that occur in isolation in these other books, and provide a clear demonstration of the affective purpose of the marginal sequences. In addition to sacred images in tune with the text are three vernacular cycles, two of which have been proven to have didactic import, and to be placed for that reason adjacent to the vernacular prayers used at mass, and beneath the Matins of the Hours of the Virgin (Brownrigg)). 60 These stories reinforce right attitudes to chivalrous knights, and demonstrate the power of virginity. As Brownrigg concludes, the stories "might have been glossed by a young woman's chaplain or spiritual adviser," the purpose of the series as a whole being "to edify as well as to entertain a noble lady of the early fourteenth century." Lions that can only be tamed by a virgin, as well as demons that torture sinners, might also terrify the recipient of the book into virtuous compliance; the urgency for her to choose between the fate of a triumphant Josaine, licked by lions, and that of the female lecher ridden by the devil is heightened by the way the artist has also placed her image in the book. The unusual representations of young women hunting various animals have not been fully decoded, but in the last chapter I suggested they connote the struggle against bestial sins rather than aristocratic pastimes (fig. 3.19).
 Figure 3.19 |
Typically, a wide range of highly expressive, sometimes caricatured, facial types dramatize every action. They exaggerate social and moral difference while sometimes eliding sexual distinctions. The pale, serene face of Christ, with small closed mouth and distant gaze, is contrasted with the darker scowling, grimacing, toothy characters who taunt him at his arrest (fig. 8).
 Figure 4.8 |
 Figure 4.9 |
In France, by 1322 (in fact on the death of Louis le Hutin's infant son
in 1316, when his brother the regent succeeded to the crown) there was
a new agreement that women could not inherit, nor succeed to the
 Figure 3.5 |
This rapidly contracted marriage raises questions about the timing of the commission for the tiny book of hours that has become known, with good documentary backing, as the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux; her will mentions it as a gift of her husband, and that it was by Jean Pucelle (3fm). 63 Yet the density of illumination on more than 200 folios, and the stylistic unity, might need more than four months to produce, even in a well-organized shop (figs. Ch. 3: 2, 5, 8, 9, 16, 39, 43).
Figure 3.2 |
 Figure 3.8 |
Figure 3.39 |
 Figure 3.16 |
 Figure 3.43 |
Figure 3.15 |
Despite some problems with the English in 1324, that presaged the Hundred Years War, the last years of Charles's reign were relatively uneventful, and the arts were thriving in Paris. Close in date and style to the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux are two books made for people in the Dominican order, one for male use, the other for female, judging by the grammatical forms of the prayers. 68 The sumptuous two-volume "Belleville" Breviary was so named for the arms on the enameled clasp as described in the inventory of Charles V's library (5me); the feasts in the calendar date its composition between 1323 and 1326, and the use is for Dominican monks (Leroquais, III, 198-210). Jeanne de Belleville is generally held to have owned this book before her marriage to Olivier III de Clisson, c. 1328. The couple are well known because their property was seized by the king when Olivier was condemned for treason and executed in 1343. Morand has suggested that Jeanne had a personal connection with the Dominican house for women at Poissy-Saint-Louis (Morand, 43-45), but it may have been other factors that gave the house ownership of the breviary some time before 1454. At least another hypothesis is worth considering: Like many aristocratic girls of her generation, Jeanne may well have been educated by Dominicans, and have had a Dominican confessor. Given the male voice of the prayers, and the fact that she is nowhere represented in the book, it might be preferable to think that she (or even her father) commissioned the book for the Jacobins, and that the clasp connoted the donor. If, in addition, there was an inscription commemorating the gift, this might be a reason to have returned the book to the Dominicans from the royal collection in the fifteenth century.
Marginal notes in the "Belleville" Breviary refer to payments by Pucelle to his assistants, and art historians have recognized one of these Parisian hands working on books made in Ghent in 1322/23 (Morand, 44). Images at the foot of the calendar pages and of the pages marking the liturgical divisions of the Psalms, and especially three compositions that are lost from the first volume, are so esoteric that their composition could not have been selected by a lay patron. Yet the famous passage explaining their symbolism is in French, perhaps to aid in teaching the laity, and as Sandler has noted, it much resembles an earlier exposition of the Christian faith provided by a Dominican confessor for Philippe III le Hardi, La Somme le Roi .69 Unlike the calendar sequence, the most complex pictures were not copied in later books for the laity.
This is a case where the marginalia provide additional arguments for the Breviary's intended use by monks for teaching men, despite the association with a lay family. Among gynephobic pictures that deserve comment are some of the Old Testament scenes unusually selected to illuminate Christian virtues and the sacraments, whether by insufficiency or by their opposite vice; these are paired in the bottom of the page at each psalter division and repeat in the second volume, and all the recipients of the sacraments are male. 70 In this selection, there is a penchant for destructive women: Eve's alliance with the devil is the counterpart of Faith and Baptism (fig. 3:24).
 Figure 3.24 |
 Figure 4.10 |
 Figure 3.26 |
Two liturgical books for female religious, a Franciscan Breviary and a Dominican Psalter with the Office of the Dead and the Hours of John the Baptist and Thomas Aquinas, provide approximate counterparts to the Belleville Breviary and the Peterborough Psalter. The Breviary of Blanche of France (1fr), now in the Vatican, was made for a cousin of Jeanne II de Navarre, one of the daughters of Philippe V le Long and Jeanne d'Artois. 72 The elegant sobriety of the page layout is very like that of the Belleville Breviary, but with less dense images below the text and more figures outside the foliate frame (fig. 3: 15 cf. 24-26).
The liturgical Psalter in Waddesdon
Manor, Buckinghamshire, was made for a Dominican nun of Saint-Louis
of Poissy (2fr).73 The calendar, albeit incomplete, and the litany
identify this use, which is confirmed by the office for Thomas Aquinas,
approved by the General Chapter in 1326. Prayers on ff. 303v and 325 mention
sisters before brothers of the order, and the sinner is in the feminine
(
 Figure 3.14a |
For reasons we can only surmise, the beautifully painted grotesques are confined to the second gathering,
one to a page which they share with a variety of wyverns (ff. 11-22v); this carries the decoration
of the psalms only part way through the first liturgical division, to
Psalm 9 (Hebrew 10) v. 8. From that point on, both leafy baguettes that
hedge in the single column of script become the tails of wyverns or winged serpents. Apart from their
sophisticated modeling and delicate coloring, the most impressive thing
about the all-male grotesques is their isolation; even when
they turn toward each other across an opening they do not interact - unlike
those that grimace across the page in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, or the paired and
group activities thy engage in all these books. 76 Their rough music accompanies no one else, and ecclesiastics
discover their bestial lower parts in solitude. They cannot interrupt
the enforced silences of the monastic life in Lent when human communication
was sacrificed of to communication with God and the saints through the
The Waddesdon Psalter is a far more austere book than the Franciscan Breviary made for Blanche de France before 1320, seemingly more suited to the life of a recluse. It does not acknowledge a female propensity to sin, as if this would only tempt its owner; and the male grotesques are a reminder of the quip that the convent wall is not to keep nuns in but to keep men out. The male grotesques do their work on a visceral level, in marked contrast to the intellectual challenges provided in the Belleville Breviary, in which the old serpent is the basis for female evil. Polarization in the treatment of women is very evident from these books, even in religious orders. This is a far cry from the eleventh century, when a Benedictine religious might hope that through virginity (and learning) she could cross the gender line to become virile. Daughters had just been devalued in France, with the decision not to allow the throne to pass to a female. Some were selected to breed from, to maintain dynastic stability; for the same reason, other siblings -- male as well as female -- were "neutered" by placing them in monastic houses.
The transition from the Capetian to the Valois dynasty was effected in 1328, after the death of Charles IV; as soon as Jeanne d'Evreux's daughter Blanche was born, the succession went to Charles and Jeanne's first cousin, Philippe de Valois, the son of Philippe le Bel's younger brother Charles; had a son been born to Jeanne, Philippe would have served as regent (Table 1). Edward III of England was closer to the Capetian line if it is traced through his mother, Isabelle of France, and this gave him and his successors a claim to the French throne that they pressed from 1337 through the rest of the century (Hedeman, 51, 62). 77 In the 1330s, Philippe VI de Valois vowed to go on crusade, and levied a tax to support it, but by 1335, he was spending the money on his campaigns against the English, instead of joining with them in holy war. He, and his son John, did not receive a papal pardon until 1344 (Hedeman, 63-64). Meanwhile, he had trouble controlling his own subjects. Edward III had a letter in French stating his claim to the title of King of England and France put up on the church doors of northern France in 1340; Philippe retaliated by ordering its confiscation and the imprisonment of the authorities who had allowed it (Hedeman, 62). In 1346, a citizen of Compiègne expressed support for the English claim and was "cut up like butcher's meat;" the next year a man went to prison for six years for claiming that the English king had superior healing powers (Cazelles, 204). 78 Even Saint Brigit of Sweden had visions concerning the validity of Philippe's rule (Hedeman, 62).
During this disturbed period, Hedeman has shown how the illustrations of the de luxe recension of the Grandes Chroniques de France made for Philippe's son Jean le Bon as a young man were inflected to aid in the process of identification with an ancient and legitimate royal past, and to instruct the heir to the throne (Hedeman, 51-73). She was able to trace this use of history back to 1274, but notes that Jean's book was embellished with additional scenes of Charlemagne's campaigns, perhaps to validate his own early military accomplishments. Indeed, national history had become a text book for male rulers. 79 On the other hand, devotional books remained the province of royal women, as if to reinforce their withdrawal from dynastic claims and their function to pray for the salvation of their house and of humanity. There was need of their prayers again when, in the last years of the reign of Philippe VI de Valois, the Black Death swept across Europe.
As a widow, the last Capetian queen, Jeanne d'Evreux, became a symbol of support for the Valois line (Cazelles, 284, 403-404). Her daughter Blanche, who would have succeeded to the throne if women were accepted, became the second wife of Jean le Bon's young brother, Philippe who was yet to rule (Table 1), and in 1353 the pope called on Jeanne d'Evreux to keep the peace between the brothers. 80 She also made several public shows of devotion, including the foundation of a chapel in the royal Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1340. 81 Her gift of a gilded statue of the Virgin and Child to Saint-Denis is dated by inscription 1339, though its proximity to the style of her Hours might indicate an earlier date for the commission. 82 It perpetuates the contrast between the virginal majesty of the Annunciate and the raucous celebration of rustics, as they had appeared on different pages in the Hours, placing the shepherds and other scenes from the narrative cycle, in colored enamels, on the back of the base as if the golden Virgin triumphs over them (Caviness 1993, fig. 31). The inscription names Jeanne Queen of France and Navarre, even though the last title had been ceded to Louis le Hutin's daughter, Jeanne, in 1329. In 1368, Jeanne d'Evreux participated in the baptism of Charles V's firstborn son, the future Charles VI; she was one of the negotiators of peace between Charles V and his rival to the throne, Charles le Mauvais (see below). Charles V's recension of the Grandes Chroniques even illustrates her holding the child in the procession, behind his godfathers, though other versions place her in the general cortege (Hedeman, 114-115, fig. 80). 83 Shortly after, in 1371, she died aged about sixty, at the Cistercian Abbey of Maubuisson. She bequeathed Pucelle's Hours to the Valois king Charles V, and three other books of hours to her daughter Blanche. 84 The miniature effigies she had commissioned for the burial of her and her husband's entrails at Maubuisson are preserved in the Louvre (Fastes, 121-22, no. 70).
In 1340, Jeanne d'Evreux had founded a chapel in Saint-Denis as a memorial for her husband, herself, and her surviving daughters, donating reliquaries and her crown to it, and she also contributed to the Franciscans and Carmelites in Paris. 85 The second volume of a Breviary with her arms (4fw) is traditionally associated with Pucelle, but it was more likely commissioned after his death in 1334; the first volume is lost. 86 The inclusion of Jeanne's arms instead of her figure, suggest to me that this breviary was made as a gift rather than for personal use. This Franciscan Breviary resembles her tiny Dominican hours in having grisaille figures on colored grounds in the scenes and grotesques in many initials, but it lacks the line-endings, marginalia, and scenes at the bottom of the pages (fig. 11a,b, 12b, 13b).
 Figure 4.11a |
 Figure 4.11b |
 Figure 4.12a |
 Figure 4.12b |
 Figure 4.13a |
The divisions of the text are marked by framed pictures that fill less than a third of a column, and an inhabited initial immediately following. Most letters are used to contain low-life or monstrous creatures, sometimes connected with the main subject.
 Figure 4.13b |
The decade before mid-century was perturbed by the Hundred Years' War as well as the plague. The de luxe monastic books just reviewed are one indication of the anxieties that beset French royalty in this period; the family members assigned to a life of prayer were expected to improve the conditions of their land. Jeanne de Belleville's husband, Olivier de Clisson, and his brother Amauri were among several Norman and Breton knights who transferred their allegiance to the English king in the early 1340s and were punished with death in 1343 (Cazelles, 151-55). There were sporadic crop failures, causing a student revolt in Orléans, and general inflation (Cazelles, 157-58, 163). The English took much of northern France, defeating Philippe VI at Crécy in 1346; Blanche of Longchamp's brother in law, Louis count of Flanders, died in the battle. Other rival claims to the throne were moot; Blanche de France, the only surviving daughter of Charles IV and Jeanne d'Evreux was married in 1345 at the age of seventeen to the nine-year-old younger son of the Valois king, Philippe d'Orléans (Table 1). Jeanne d'Evreux approved the union, which merged this Capetian branch with the Valois line, and seems to have played a role in staving off any claims from the older Capetian branch, represented by Louis le Hutin's daughter Jeanne, to whom Philippe VI had restored the kingdom of Navarre.
This daughter of Louis le Hutin, Jeanne II Queen of Navarre (1311-1349), was conceived well before the adultery scandal concerning her mother Marguerite de Bourgogne and she became a sister-in-law of Jeanne d'Evreux, who had once held the title of Navarre; her husband, Philippe d'Evreux, died before her, in 1343. She was a formidable administrator, gradually advancing her rents and estates, and in 1348 negotiated her own terms with Edward III (Cazelles, 205-208). Jeanne is named in a prayer in a Franciscan book of hours now in Paris (7fm/w), and her arms are depicted several times in the margins. 89 The first person of this prayer ("I, Jeanne"), combined with the frequent appearances of a young crowned woman throughout, indicate her ownership of the book, whether as wife or widow. However, the representation of King Philippe VI and his first wife Jeanne de Bourgogne kneeling before relics on a cloth of honor with their arms has been taken as a sign that he may have commissioned the book for Jeanne, whose arms are also held by an ape at the bottom of this page (f. 150), and who attends the mass for this feast of the relics of martyrs on the verso. Such a precious book might have been a gift to Jeanne when she ceded the county of Champagne to the king in 1336, a date which is plausible for the Pucellian style (Morand, 48-49). This was symbolic of her concession of the throne to the Valois line. Only after her death in 1349 was there was another contestant, in the persona of her eldest son, Charles of Navarre (also known as Charles le Mauvais). In 1353, his younger brother, Philippe de Navarre, became the second husband of Yolande of Flanders, an heiress in her own right, for whom the last women's book in the series discussed here was made (9fm).
Most of Jeanne de Navarre's appearances in her book are associated with mothering. From the distance of the margins, the young queen addresses her prayers at Prime to the Nativity group which, unusually, shows the Virgin suckling the Child; Jeanne is precariously balanced on an ivy frond, poised between the sacred world of the virgin birth and that of a woman seated on the ground to suckle her baby in the bottom of the page; to the left on this base level an ominous bearded grotesque, his long mantle almost disguising his basilisk hind parts, embraces another swaddled child (fig. 3.41).
Figure 3.41 |
Figure 3.44 |
Jeanne de Navarre also prays to selected saints: to St. Nicholas the patron of children (Santa Claus); 92 to her canonized Franciscan relative, St. Louis "de Marseille" (=of Toulouse, f. 191); and to St. Helena at the discovery of the Holy Cross (her role in the Christian life of her son, Emperor Constantine, would be a model for Jeanne; f. 183). Jeanne also contemplates the Flagellation (f. 125v). As well as receiving the host at the mass for the relics of martyrs (f. 150v ), a further reminder of her religious duties is provided by an angel who leads her to make her gifts to the poor (f. 123v). Some of the sequences in the book refer back to works by Pucelle, though the Hours of St. Louis present a somewhat different picture sequence from that in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. 93 There are more scenes with St. Louis as a boy, including Blanche of Castille teaching him to read, which could have served as a model for Jeanne. 94 In fact, when their books were commissioned, sons had already been born to both Jeanne II de Navarre and Bonne of Luxembourg, so these mothers may have anticipated using them to teach their children to read; their size and bright coloring, as well as the vernacular of the prayers, would make this activity congenial. It was not yet fashionable to lay importance on mothers teaching their daughters to read, under the guidance of St. Anne, though there are early fourteenth-century examples of the iconography (Sheingorn). And by the 1370s, the Grandes Chroniques made for Charles V adjusted the iconography of the royal ancestor, to show Blanche of Castille resting after giving birth, and Louis being educated by a school master (Hedeman, 124-25, fig. 87).
Like the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg and the Hours of Jeanne de Savoie, lively draftsmanship, a variety of natural birds, and bright colors (blue and ochre, purple and orange, pink and gold) mitigate the impact of the freaks, which, in fact, are relatively few in the Hours of Jeanne II de Navarre (Table 2b). Playful young boys outnumber male grotesques. Even the unusually large number of apes are more burlesque than lewd: Whereas in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux a grotesque played for an acrobatic ape to perform, on the feast of the relics page here one ape drums for a woman to dance with a puppet on her head and another clashes cymbals to accompany a bearded herm on the viol (fig. 14).
 Figure 4.14 |
 Figure 4.15 |
Figure 3.39 |
Despite the lighter mode of representation some user has also expunged a few offending images in the margins; most likely this was done after Jeanne de Navarre's lifetime, in the same iconoclastic campaign as the erasure of her crown. 97 The erasures include the lower part of a female grotesque who pleads with a male grotesque proffering a flask in the margins of the Nativity (f. 145v), and other motifs in the same gathering (grotesques with birds on ff. 141, 142, an archer aiming at a saint on f. 142v, a woman with a stringed instrument on f. 146v, and an ape with a boy on f. 153), as well as a youth in a tub on f. 178v. The iconoclasm seems arbitrary, notably on f. 153 where an ape engaging in auto-anal/olfactory play has been left undamaged. However, several of the apes throughout are severely rubbed, indicating that they caused anxiety (fig. 14). Obscenities and freaks had not entirely lost their power for this generation of iconoclasts.
A grotesque soldier participates in the Massacre of the Innocents, at the bottom of a page with St. Peter thrown into prison by a black jailer (f. 188). And the prophet who points to the opening of the office for the feast of relics tramples underfoot an androgynous grotesque defending itself from the lance of an ape with a hammer (fig. 14). The overall incidence of combative freaks and animals with low-life weapons, and of rough music, have become distant reminders of an evil world hedged out by a devout way of life, as if belonging to other classes and races. Yet they were designed to be much less threatening and disruptive to this Jeanne than to the pubescent queen of the same name a decade earlier.
Another queen's book with extensive use of grisaille, like that of Jeanne d'Evreux, is the Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg (8fm).98 A daughter of the king of Bohemia, in 1322 she married Jean Duke of Normandy, son and heir of Philippe VI le Valois. The couple are represented kneeling before Christ on the Cross (f. 329), and their impaled arms are painted under each picture. Bonne died in 1349, at a time when her husband was busy consolidating his claim to France; his immediate marriage to Jeanne, dowager countess of Auvergne and Boulogne (and with a claim to Artois and Burgundy as a great-grandchild of Mahaut of Artois), so effectively advanced his hold on the north and east that it was rumored he had murdered Bonne, and that he had summarily had her supposed lover, the Count of Eu, executed (Cazelles, 228, 249). Whatever the truth of either charge, Jean II le Bon effortlessly succeeded to the throne in 1350. Bonne's son Charles V continued the Valois dynasty, and, together with his brothers the illustrious Dukes of Anjou, Burgundy and Berry, formed the major collections of illumined manuscripts of the second half of the century. The style of Bonne's psalter has been associated with Jean le Noir, a follower of Pucelle, and it appears to date not long before her death; not a new bride, she was already secure in the provision of heirs to the throne. 99 Uncannily though, her mind had turned toward death, which is figured by a dramatic representation of the Three Living and the Three Dead Kings, and long prayer in French (only the psalms are in Latin). 100
Except for numerous colorful birds and a few freaks perched in the ivy leaf frames, the marginalia are confined to beasts in the colored rinceaux grounds of some of the pictures, and bottom-of-the-page grotesques functioning as arms bearers (not unlike the caryatids in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux; fig. 3:17).
 Figure 3.17 |
 Figure 4.16 |
Despite allusions to Pucelle's great precedent (the tiny hours that Jeanne d'Evreux had left to Bonne's son Charles in 1328) Bonne's prayer book is overall more colorful and light-hearted, some grisaille pages notwithstanding. The anxiety that is palpable there has been dissipated. Calendar activities and zodiac signs show some beautiful young men, and there is no special concern for sexual proscription or fecundity. Whereas the nude male and female twins for May were joined behind a single incestuous shield that remains blank in the hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, here they brazenly hold the shield of France impaling Luxembourg!
Jeanne II de Navarre's daughter-in-law, Yolande of Flanders, probably received her Book of Hours after the Black Death, about the time of her marriage to Philippe de Navarre in 1353 since her arms appear with his (9fm).102 Born in 1326, at the age of fourteen she had married Henri IV, Duc de Bar, and bore him two sons before she was widowed in 1344. Since her brother died in childhood, she was sole heiress to her father Robert of Flanders, seigneur of Cassel. 103 The usual anxieties about a second marriage may be expressed in her devotional book. In various initials, a young woman in penitential gray receives a benediction from a Franciscan monk or confessor (f. 51v), or prays to the Virgin and Child (f. 97).
 Figure 3.11 |
Figure 3.14a |
As if by way of compensation for these saintly subjects, however, the full force of isolated grotesques in the Hours of Yolande, like those of the Poissy-St.-Louis Psalter, is expressed through ever more monstrous contortions and sinister combinations (figs. 3: 11 & 13 cf. 14). Many are herms, in that the bar and ivy foliage of the frame emerges from their drapery.
 Figure 3.13 |
 Figure 4.17 |
 Figure 4.18 |
Such creatures indulge in rough music. A youthful male herm plays the bagpipes as a marionette perched on his head swings her arms (f. 82v ). Elsewhere a bearded grotesque with cloven hoofs and serpentine tail swings its arms to the pipe and drum of a young herm (f. 21). A curly-headed boy with the hind-parts of a wyvern puffs his cheeks to sound an oliphant, and literally blows his head off (f. 44). Two creatures play the horse's jaw, an eerie shivaree instrument that is still played in the Andes (f. 113v). 107 One of these reverses the norm for grotesques by using human hands to bow the jaw with a rake, while he turns a bearded billy-goat head to listen (f. 88, fig. 3: 13).
Similarly, a fox-faced herm almost hides in a Franciscan cowl that is knotted round the waist in the usual way, but this time there is no proof of any humanity (f. 30). Nothing is sacred: A bishop giving a benediction is satirized by the bellows on his head instead of a miter, and the cloven-hoofed terminal to his crosier (f 38). Book-learning is in the hands of a turbaned grotesque whose rump and bats' wings provide a convenient lectern (f. 15); and a monk examining a flask leafs through the medical reference on his desk while a hare and a wyvern peer down from line-endings (f. 116v); the monk is based on a similar figure in the Poissy-St.-Louis Psalter, and the latter figures appeared in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux.
Combat in the Hours of Yolande is ferocious, with none of the chivalric parody of the Breviary of Blanche of France. A wildman with a knobby stick seems to hit at the bar from which he dangles, and a phallic neck emerging in front of him twists into a biting basilisk head, ready to devour the very end of his leafy tail (fig. 3:11).
Figure 3.11 |
These morbid freaks overpower the signs of fecundity, numerous though they are - hares outnumber hounds by five to one, barrels and pots are legion, and the foliage is the most lush of the whole group (Table 2b). In all its elements -- the didactic sacred pictures, the horrid monsters, the symbols of generation -- the programs of this book appear overdetermined. It contrasts sharply with the austerity of the monastic psalter at Waddesdon (fig. 3: 14a,b,c). The cumulative impact of these images played such ghastly tricks on a particularly visually sensitive friend who was helping me tabulate the motifs in the margins that she had to abandon the project.
Figure 3.11 |
With this book, made for Yolande just before the king was defeated and captured at Poitiers and imprisoned in England, we come to the end of the series studied here. The number of prayer books with marginalia made for wealthy women in this half century of natural and man-made catastrophe indicates the extent to which they were defined as "those who pray," though without the authority of priests. As the powers of the king gradually declined, between 1328 and 1347, these heiresses and widows were essential commodities in the passing of land from one man to another (Table 1). Their husbands appear not to have used the books they gave their wives, though they might appear in them in perpetual prayer. For them, holding onto the kingdom or their own lands meant endless military campaigns and intrigues. They presumably had no time or inclination for these complexly decorated devotional books that neither provided an escape from harsh realities nor represented them openly.
A prelude to this series was a tiny Flemish psalter crawling with basilisks but otherwise mute as to the conditions of life of its owner (1m?). As a postscript, I reflect on the Grandes Heures of Bonne's son, Jean de France, duc de Berry, an immense book in comparison to all others of the series (about four times the size of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, which he owned by this time). Documents indicate that the book was ordered in 1407 and completed in 1409 (6mm).108 The owner is shown praying, like the earlier married women, to the Virgin and Child in the initial below the Annunciation (ff. 8, 34), and again with St. Peter (f. 96), and his arms appear frequently in the margins.
A greater interest in naturalism around 1400 means that nudity is more frank and sensual than before, but it is still associated with bestiality, and there are a good many apes. Some classic gynephobic lessons for a prince seem to be present: A man in a fool's cap embraces a female grotesque with a long green tail (f. 11v), and a group of nude men and grotesques on f. 32 are like a lesson on lewdness, and elsewhere impious nude female freaks suckle an infant (f. 20), or offer their breasts to grotesques in response to adjacent phrases of the office of the dead (ff. 118, 120). Furthermore, the Virgin is seated at a loom in the Temple, validating textile arts rather than reading for women (f. 34). Indeed, by this time, few books were being made for women.
This is the only one of the Duc de Berry's great illuminated books that has freaks in the margins, and it seems self-consciously "retro." The principal program is modeled on the Belleville Breviary, still in his older brother's collection, including the calendar scenes, but the repertory of male grotesques is more like the women's books, especially the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. This eclectic borrowing, regardless of gender, demonstrates that the old ways of encoding messages were no longer of primary concern. The proportion of female to male freaks is within the range for men's books, but the sexual identity of a large number is ambiguous. Some motifs, such as the bellows and pots that had been associated with sexuality and fecundity, are repeated in line fillers as mere props. Overall, the impact of the marginalia is diluted, in part by the size of the pages. Jean's Grandes Heures speaks the language of a collector's item rather than a cultural artifact invested with an urgent mission.
Engendering Grotesques, Essential(ist) or Not?
A postmodern account requires us to re-open the question of hegemonies. By treating men's as well as women's books in a single historical narrative, it has become evident that procreation was an equal imperative for the lay men and women whose access to wealth depended on their lineages, and that legitimacy carried an equal moral burden in the eyes of the church. These considerations give even more force to the modern view that gender is essential to the family. If procreation was unequal in risk (as it always is, but exacerbated then by women's early deaths in childbirth), the historical record indicates that in the early fourteenth century men were probably as vulnerable to war and to capital punishment as women to birthing.
Figure 4.7 |
 Figure 4.19 |
The paradox of the heterosexual imperative is that the medieval concept of sexual difference distributed on a continuum seems to have exerted pressure to socially construct and reinforce binary difference. Just as the current reaction against notions of multivalent sexual identity (such at Laqueur's deconstruction of sexual difference) has caused Christian extremists to reassert binary opposites, so in the middle ages, the polarization of gender difference was a social imperative that was not easily given up; it provided social and biological instability with a simple binary structure. As we are re-experiencing now, any acknowledgment that the very idea of sexual difference is a myth reactivates the social energies that are invested in that construction.
Figure 4.13 |
Yet some figures in the manuscripts refused easy clarification with respect to gender and/or age, and they infringe other boundaries: The old are ugly (and low born), and child-grotesques are out of control; neither responds readily to gender classification (figs. 19 cf. 7, 13, and 3: 2, 14, 19, 30). Even a youthful Janus can be feminine, and fools and hags meld into one another, becoming witch-like (witch is not a gendered term; fig. 18).
Figure 4.18 |
 Figure 4.20 |
In Christian terms, these youthful grotesques would be reminders that those who are begotten in the normal way are born with original sin; there is no childish innocence in this theology. These creatures, impish to us, might have reminded the original readers of these books to see to the baptism of their children in order to cleanse them of original sin; or mothers who at that time commonly used fear in raising their children could have pointed them out as warnings ("See what will happen if you . . ."). 109 They have clear antitheses in the angels that cluster around the Nativity, some risking a half-length appearance in the upper windows of the house of the Annunciation, while others are clearly given bare feet under their long gowns (Caviness 1993, fig. 2). These child-grotesques share their golden hair and delicate faces, even sometimes wings, with the angels. On an intellectual level, their audience could have decoded the androgynous grotesques as fallen angels, kin to the more sinister ones with bat's wings and long hair, yet the more deceptive because they are more beguiling. Here we encounter the aporia between the medieval discourse of sexuality, that did not sanction same-sex attraction, and the post modern discourse of sexuality that encompasses queer theory. 110
Such alluring beauty finds companionship with the sirens that assemble in men's books to tempt and repel them. Thus configured as objects of illicit desire, they become a proscription against sodomy. And their androgyny renders them just as eloquent in women's books, where they may remind her of the good behavior manuals that emphasized the dangers of sinning with other women (reviewed in chapter three). In either case, sexual attraction might be quickly thwarted by the lack of genitals: If we apply Freud's pleasure deprivation principle, they should arouse the kind of anger that would label them obscene (Caviness 1998, 156-158). Yet that model is not necessarily appropriate here, because as far as we know medieval art never produced a wholly erotic spectacle of the nude, so it might not have occupied an imaginary field outside the grotesque; as quoted in the last chapter, Giles of Rome referred to nude representations as ugly.
There were other valencies to these angelic child-grotesques. They cluster in very large
numbers in the "Pucellian" books, almost like signatures. Is this what
it means for a male artist (named for the virgin saint, John) to use the
appellate of a female virgin (pucelle)? Virginity was the threshold where
sexual difference became irrelevant, according to the old virgo/vir word
play. The social groups for whom this was of concern were monastic. Monks
and nuns were constructed as a non-procreative gender, the worker bees
of God (performing the
Yet the children and child-freaks in the margins nag differently at the contemporary
reader, and possibly on some disavowed level at the fourteenth-century
viewers. At this juncture, an historical reading is at variance with a
postmodern one, and by juxtaposing them we will see the fissures in the
medieval system of signing. In a below-text scene in the Psalter of Guy de Dampierre, one boy turns to show
his underpants to an archer who is as indeterminate in gender as the hunter
in the Taymouth
 Figure 4.21 |
Later on, in the third generation, the Grandes Heures of the Duc de Berry
no doubt allowed the sophisticated connoisseur to escape the sermonizing,
merely enjoying the "art" while musing on his royal ancestors. By 1400
Europe had "recovered" from the population losses of the Great Famine
and the Black Death. There was more wealth to go around a depleted population,
but it had been rapidly assimilated by the men who ruled huge estates.
The
The Politics of Difference: Some Modern and Post-Modern Theories
This dramatic example cited by Christine de Pisan "brings home" women's
investment in praxis. The
Expanding on the brief overview given in the Introduction, a genealogy of the sex/gender question can make this situation clear in ways that are not countenanced for instance in Bruce Smith's theoretical treatment, despite his attention to sources in Marxism. 115 Tracing various notions of sexual difference in western thought provides a fascinating and at times breath-taking saga, with far more distant beginnings than are normally acknowledged. As long ago as 1935, Mead posited that traits associated with one or other biological sex are socially, rather than biologically determined. 116 Social anthropology was predisposed to privilege cultural over natural causes, and thus to "discover" gender construction. But perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of Mead's work was her emphasis on infinite variation in human sex/gender arrangements. The comparative base of her study taught her that one people may enlarge upon biological differences, such as the fact of being the first-born son, while another may choose to overlook such differences, "recognizing neither age, sex, nor special disposition as points for differential elaboration" (Mead, vi). In fact her carefully chosen cases among neighboring peoples in New Guinea presented dramatic alternatives to the standard western one of binary polarity and male domination: "Each of these tribes had, as has every human society, the point of sex-difference to use as one theme in the plot of social life, and each of these three peoples has developed that theme differently" (Mead, ix). Mead described the Arapesh as almost uniformly "co-operative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others;" the Mundugumor she found to be "ruthless, aggressive, positively sexed individuals" regardless of biological sex; and in the Tchumbuli she found "a genuine reversal of the sex-attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person" (Mead, 279). She acknowledged the power of "imaginary reversal" that was implicit in her predecessors' descriptions of matriarchy (Mead, x). Even though later field workers have contested some of her specific observations or judgments, it is in the realm of the Imaginary that Mead's contribution still deserves attention; she dared to entertain an infinite array of possible sex/gender constructions, rather than following the lead in German psychology to designate a third sex. 117
In a thoughtful chapter on "The Deviant," Mead emphasized the extent to which the social behaviors that are prescribed and proscribed to separate male and female in western societies have been claimed as natural (Mead, 297-298). Whatever any defects in the observational base, and whatever naïveté adheres to her discussion of Fascist and Communist systems, Mead's account of gender has the great merit of insisting that women cannot be studied without men, and that the oppressor is also oppressed: "There can be no society which insists that women follow one special personality-pattern, defined as feminine, which does not do violence also to the individuality of many men" (Mead, x & 312-313).
Next in my genealogy (and in the epigraph) is Baudrillard, who in an article on fetishism first published in French in 1970 (and in English translation in 1981) boldly declared " Le masculin/féminin " to be an example of a semiological reduction of symbolic meanings that is integral to the ideological process at work in capitalist societies (1970, 222; 1981, 99). He invoked a social system with clearly distinguished and opposed sexes, that rest in fact on the "alibi" of genital difference, marshalling the construction of gender (structuration dirigée) because sexual segregation is one of the ideological and political foundations of the social order. 118 Individuals have to be led to identify with their sexual status, surrendering the nuances of their own bodily experience of difference to the social order because binary opposites, encoding hierarchy, are essential to a capitalist system of order and social values.
In so far as the concept of gender construction has been liberating, it is Baudrillard rather than Stoller who should be credited with its invention, even though a single dense paragraph, imbedded in an article on fetishism that presents itself as a critique of Marx, could not -- and did not -- revolutionize gender studies. 119 It was not until twenty-five years later a Marxist gay rights advocate linked oppression based on class, sex and gender (Feinberg, 51 & chs 3-11). Nor did the abstruse formulations of Lacan, whose Seminars were taking place in Paris at the same time and whose ideas on sexual difference reached their final phase in 1972-75; critiquing Freud, he evolved the notion that the man/woman distinction is purely symbolic, part of the construction of hegemonic categories within language; this process promotes imaginary unity on the side of the man, whereas "woman," as the basis of male fantasy, is divided, in part occupying the space of the Other (or God) which for Lacan had no reality. 120
Neither Baudrillard nor Lacan had an immediate impact on gender theory as such, but by the 1970s and 80s a great quantity of publications pondered the destabilization of male-female difference, or rather, the diminution of its sphere of meaning, through the notion of gender construction. 121 Kristeva, a follower of Lacan, questioned whether "woman as such" exists when she was confronted with the difference between western capitalist Judeo-Christian women and Communist Chinese women (Kristeva, 16). Yet a divide remained in the consideration of gender, depending whether it was to be defined on a societal basis (the legacy of Marx, Mead, and Baudrillard) or an individual one (the legacy of Freud and Lacan, but transmitted in the English language studies through Stoller). 122 Both notions were used in the analysis of cultural production; literature was privileged over the visual arts in this work, but in 1976 for instance the anthropological model was adapted to a study of visual representations of subjects in contemporary advertising. 123 A decade later Joan Scott claimed gender as a "useful term" for historical analysis. 124
Barrett's important essay on "Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender," first published in 1980, has been summarized in the Introduction, where I expanded upon her quadrangle of terms (stereotypes, collusion, compensation, and recuperation) as "processes by which the work of reproducing gender ideology is done." This article was reprinted in 1985 in a ground-breaking collection that examined representations of sex, class, and race in literature and culture. Some critics of the visual arts had already taken up the notions of ideology and gender that had frequently appeared in literary criticism. By the mid-eighties, for instance, Annette Kuhn declared that pornographic photography takes part in the work of gender formation, by structuring/constructing a male gaze, and by confirming heterosexual sex as the legitimate goal of sexual arousal. 125
In 1982, Heath published a wide-ranging study of the commodification of sex in modern society, through the construction of "sexuality," and this he identified as opposing "change in the social relations of subjectivity, of our existence as related individuals" (Heath, 1982, 4, 9); in other words, sex, as well as gender, is a construction that forms a political divide among people. And in an Australian publication from 1983, Gatens pointed out that the sex/gender distinction threatened to separate the (naturally) sexed body from the socialized, gendered mind, whereas, she claimed, notions of biological difference are also culturally based: "feminine behaviors are not merely the result of patriarchal socialization and conditioning, ... or a discursively constituted category lacking a referent, but additionally are modes of defensive behavior which utilize the culturally shared fantasies about biology -- that is, they are manifestations of and reactions to the (conscious and unconscious) ideas we share about our biology" (Gatens, 152). 126 This rift in gender theory was to be widened by Laqueur, who destabilized western "phantasies about biology" by writing a history of their very different configurations through time. 127
With hindsight we can now see that a momentous analysis of the workings and goals of "Feminism and Deconstruction," published by Poovey in 1988, predicted most of the ways in which deconstruction subsequently problematized the term "women" (as by Butler in 1990). She also suggested that a fragmentation of the binary groups men/women in relation to the differing experiences of race, class and sexual preference could guide feminists in praxis and in the historical project, thus dislodging deconstruction from its conservative and ahistorical stance while allowing it to deconstruct the masculine/feminine binary. This short, remarkably clear statement was a prolegomena for the next decade, but did not receive the direct attention it deserved.
In 1989, Lauretis enlisted Michel Foucault's idea that discourses operate to maintain power structures, notably "about four privileged 'figures' or objects of knowledge: the sexualization of children and the female body, the control of procreation, and the psychiatirization of anomalous sexual behavior as perversion," and that these discourses "became especially focused on the family" (1989, 243); but she resisted his notion that bodies and pleasures could exist outside the hegemonic construction of sexuality -- or gender. Patriarchal (family) relationships permeate all the discourses she deconstructed: "Gender is absolutely essential to the family. In fact, we may add, it is as necessary to the constitution of the family as it is itself, in turn, forcefully constructed and inevitably reproduced by the family" (Lauretis, 1989, 241). We have seen just how urgently fourteenth-century clerics held gender to be necessary to the family.
Also in 1989, Garber offered a critique of gender studies that blamed the appearance of neutrality for an obfuscation of inequalities (Garber, 137). Her demonstration of dissymmetry in the "rhetorical matter" of traditional sayings that acknowledge gender construction is useful for my historical project: she pointed out that it is common to say/write that some experience would "make a man" out of a boy, whereas girls "become women" when they menstruate, but when men "make" women or girls during intercourse this does not mean the female's status is necessarily permanently altered. 128 In closing, she called for a deconstruction of the new binarism between "constructed" and "essential," and called for acknowledgment of "the age-old boundary between 'male' and 'female'" (157).
By 1990 another theoretical breakthrough occurred that was as momentous as the notion of gender construction. Whereas modernist polarities had merely shifted from a two-sex model to a two-gender model and threatened to reassert body/mind and natural/cultural dichotomies, the postmodern impulse works to dislodge the axiality of gender difference (Hawkesworth, 662-63). At this watershed between modernism and postmodernism, possibly even between feminism and post-feminism, Rhode edited a collection of papers given at a conference in 1987 (Rhode, 1990). 129 Frye, whose essay on feminist theory is often cited now, expressed a hope for multivalence that would still unite some mythic "we": " What we want to do is to speak of and to and from the circumstances, experience, and perception of those who are historically, materially, and culturally constructed by or through the concept woman" (Frye, 176). She deconstructed the notion by allowing that "although all female humans may live lives shaped by concepts of Woman, they are not all shaped by the same concept of Woman." Differences that have become a familiar litany of the 90s - class, race, religion, age, sexual orientation - qualify gender, challenging its binary reduction. Yet Frye concluded that the category of "women" is constituted as an epistemic community by "a common (but not homogeneous) oppression," and that it might be held "for a long time in a degree of community" by its "common history of oppression and liberation." Turning this around as a historian, I claim the writing of our histories of oppression and liberation not merely as a tool in binding this epistemic community (which would be to participate in gender construction), but to bind together a larger community that wishes to end oppression. 130
The same year (1990) a different kind of intervention claimed the arbitrariness of sexual difference by examining its semantic representation in the scientific discourses of western culture over time. By claiming that it was not until the eighteenth century that the female reproductive organs were distinguished from the male in name, the historian Thomas Laqueur introduced Mead's imaginary field of infinitely varied social constructions of gender into our own culture's past (Laqueur, esp. 52-70). He offered much information on the ancient, medieval, and renaissance discourses of difference in sex and gender, sexuality, and procreation, although medieval formulations of sex/gender differences were far more complex than he allowed for (Cadden, 2-3). 131 He claimed that the modern discourse of binary opposites sprang from a watershed in the eighteenth century when "the womb, which had been a sort of negative phallus, became the uterus--an organ whose fibers, nerves, and vasculature provided a naturalistic explanation and justification for the social status of women" (Laqueur, 151-152). Like Baudrillard and Lacan (but for different reasons), Laqueur dismissed the truth-claims of the modern formulation that two sexes are opposite, and recognized sexual difference as a contested site in the larger frame of politics; the "politics of gender" drives biological research, and "empirical testing ... is logically independent of biological facts because already embedded in the language of science, at least when applied to any culturally resonant construal of sexual difference, is the language of gender" (152-153). He rightly found no utopias in earlier sex/gender arrangements, but it seems to me noteworthy that the new theory of opposites gained currency at a time when women were rapidly losing power, and that their condition became even worse in the nineteenth century when the vagaries of the uterus could be offered as an excuse for their oppression.
Laqueur's Making Sex set the tenor of the 1990s debate over sex/gender systems by extending the concept of social construction to the very notion of biological difference, using historiography to denaturalize the givens of modernist thinking about binary difference. Also published in 1990, Butler's Gender Trouble offered the philosophical tool that, with Laqueur, may overturn the foundational assumptions of "women's studies." She predicted that "the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism" (Butler, 1990, vii). The question she posed at the outset of her work still hovers over us a decade later: Is there some commonality among "women" that preexists their oppression, or do "women" have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone? Is there a specificity to women's cultures that is independent of their subordination by hegemonic, masculinist cultures?" (Butler, 1990, p. 4]. She urged that we pay more rigorous attention to apparently "real" differences, keeping in mind that "cultural configurations of gender" may masquerade as "the real" by a process of "self-naturalization" (32-33). For Butler there are no representations of something real, only appearances: "Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender. ... The univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and the binary framework for both sex and gender are considered ... as regulatory fictions that consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression" (33). Laqueur had also drawn in the political agenda of genital ontologies that constitute "sex." Cristelle Baskins responded immediately to Butler, with a case study in Italian Renaissance art that demonstrated the bisexual valence of a woman's body and its symbolic use in homosexual discourse.
If sex is "a performatively enacted signification," as Butler suggested, the stereotypical, repetitive and "unrealistic" images of aristocratic wives kneeling in prayer on the pages of their own devotional books take on a greater importance as part of the "regulatory frame." It is irrelevant whether the "actual woman/wife" (femme) Jeanne d'Evreux laughed or cried over the margins in her book, because she may now be seen as the fictive subject of a cultural project that represented her in terms of sexual desire and chastity. Her fictive nature is the more apparent to us because we tend to invert the medieval ascription of voracious sexual desire to women, assuming instead that men have a greater "natural" sex drive. 132 But whereas the prevailing attitude in our culture is that men must be forgiven their nature, in the middle ages Christian morality intervened to insist that (women's) nature must be controlled. The result for the bearers of children was the same in both cases.
Postmodern theory cannot liberate society from the verbal and pictorial representations of "men" and women" that are so firmly embedded in its hegemonic structures; as Butler cautiously stated it, "the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical structures engender, naturalize and immobilize" (Butler, 1990, 5). She expanded these concepts in 1993, with an attack on the residue of "deterministic accounts" in the arguments martialed by anti-pornography political activist MacKinnon. 133 Yet neither this vein of "post-feminist" thinking, nor the postmodern critique of the biological sciences, are prepared to take into account the inertia of traditions that are readily galvanized into action in the form of backlash. 134 Far from curtailing biological accounts of difference, recent interest in gay rights and queer theory has at times risked encouraging reactionary theories that differentiate gay males from straight males. 135 Concomitantly, postmodern theory seems in danger of retreating into a utopia instead of remaining committed to praxis; in schools and at the polls, in hospitals and churches, in business and in the military, perhaps above all in the home, binary notions of gender have scarcely begun to be destabilized, and the mounting rhetoric of "family values" in the US is but one sign of the backlash. 136 As Lauretis had affirmed, gender is necessary to the family. Krueger's account, first published in 1990, also took note that the critique of essentialism by feminist theorists carried the risk that "to deny the 'difference' of reading as a woman would be to deny the reality of the political forces that continue to shape women's lives and to repress female sexuality". 137 In 1994 a theoretical review article by Fuss laid out some of the tensions between feminism and essentialism, specifically the problem of identifying a class of women readers, but eventually arguing that "politics emerges as feminism's essence" (Fuss, 112). 138 In a paper that Flax developed over the preceding decade, she too conceded that "without feminist political actions theories remain inadequate and ineffectual" (Flax, 69).
This is precisely why the medieval model I have chosen to study is more significant for us at the turn of the century than it was when I began to work on it in the late eighties. Viewed then in light of modernist theories of gender construction, the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux merely provided another example of the imposition of patriarchal dominance within western society; my findings were in agreement with feminist complaints that men oppressed women, and for many it was of no interest that one more example had confirmed this pattern, nor even that the means of oppression were pictorial. However, most art historians in the US still denied that canonical (museumized) art does ideological work, despite Baudrillard's eloquent claims to the contrary (1981, chapters 3, 4 & 5). Furthermore, the logocentric arena of feminist theory has left pre-modern pictorial representation out of its accounts. Yet we are now fast approaching a situation that in several aspects mirrors one pertaining in early fourteenth-century Europe: Galen's view that biological sexual difference is not simply binary prevailed in the medieval discourse of sexuality, and the attention paid to it now constitutes something close to a revival. Mead and Baudrillard met with resistance, but Laqueur and Butler are now much-cited "authorities" who deny the "reality" of binary difference. My historical model provides the warning that far from such a notion being liberating, it may in the high middle ages have been an (additional) imperative for the structuring of sex/gender arrangements in such a way that they were aligned with heterosexual desire and "man's" God-given rule over "women." 139
Yet, then as now, hegemonic difference in fact places several social groups in the category of "other." Fourteenth-century culture under stress victimized many such groups: Heretics, schismatics, Moslems, Jews, lepers, adulterers, homosexuals, the poor. To some extent the disempowerment of women at that time protected them from violent persecutions, and well-born wives and nuns may have been somewhat sheltered from the dire consequences of economic failure and armed conflict. However, in the long run, they paid the price for that segregation. In a slightly later period, women were so nearly powerless, yet so feared, that they too had to be persecuted, and great numbers were burned as witches.
Essential Reading for Chapter 4: Edging out Difference
Note: This is organized in two sections: The first lists sources for modern and post-modern theories of gender/sexual difference. The second deals with the medieval historical and artistic context. Some additional bibliographic references for the manuscripts whose marginalia were tabulated in the last chapter are in the footnotes here.
I: Medieval reading communities, and their historical context.
- Alexander, Jonathan J. " Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor." Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 436-52.
- Avril, François. Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: The Fourteenth Century . New York: George Braziller, 1978.
- Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
- Blamires, Alcuin. The Case for Women in Medieval Culture . Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
- Brown, Elizabeth A.R. "The Political Repercussions of Family Ties in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Marriage of Edward II of England and Isabelle of France." Speculum 63 (1988): 573-95.
- Brown, Elizabeth A. R. "Adultery, Charivari, and Political Criticism in Early-Fourteenth-Century France: Les livres de Fauvel ." unpublished paper, 1991.
- Brown, Elizabeth A. R. Customary Aids and Royal Finance in Capetian France: The Marriage Aid of Phillip the Fair . Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1992.
- Brownrigg, Linda. " The Taymouth Hours and the Romance of Beves of Hampton. " English Manuscript Studies I (1991): 222-41.
- Camille, Michael, "Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter." Art History 10 (1987): 423-54.
- Camille, Michael. The Gothic Idol . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Cadden, Joan. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Caviness, Madeline H. "Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for her Marriage Bed." Speculum 68 (1993): 333-62; reprinted in Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism , ed. Nancy F. Partner, 31-60. Cambridge, MA: 1993; with annotated bibliography: 175-81.
- Caviness, Madeline H. "Obscenity and Alterity: Images that Shock and Offend Us/Them, Now/Then?" In Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages . Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions, 4, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski, 155-75. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
- Cazelles, Raymond. La Société politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe de Valois . Paris: Librairie d'Argences, 1958.
- Chronique latine: Henri Géraud, ed., Chronique latine de Guillaume de Nangis [= Jean Fillons de Venette] de 1113 à 1300, avec la continuation de cette chronique de 1300 à 1368 , vol. I. Paris: J. Renouard, 1843.
- Dreux du Radier, Jean François. Mémoires historiques, critiques et anecdotiques des reines et régentes de France, 3. Paris: De L'imprimerir des Frères Mame, 1808.
- Giles of Rome. Li Livres du Gouvernement des Rois: A XIIIth Century French Version of Egidio Colonna's Treatise De Regimine Principum . Trans. Henri de Gauchy, ed. Samuel Paul Molenaer. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1899.
- Fastes : Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Les Fastes du Gothique: le siècle de Charles V , Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1981.
- Favier, Jean. Philippe le Bel . Paris: Fayard, 1978.
- Fourez, Lucien. "Le Psaurier de Louis le Hutin, 1315," Revue belge d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art, 15 (1945): 101-115.
- Gillerman, Dorothy. Enguerran de Marigny and the Church of Notre-Dame at Ecouis . University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
- Guest, Gerald B. "A Discourse on the Poor: The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux." Viator 26 (1995): 153-80.
- Holladay, Joan A. "The Education of Jeanne d'Evreux: Personal Piety and Dynastic Salvation in her Book of Hours at the Cloisters." Art History 17 (1994): 585-611.
- Hedeman, Anne D. The Royal Image: Ilustrations of the
Grandes Chroniques de France , 1274-1422. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. - Jordan, William Chester. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
- Lehugeur, Paul. Histoire de Philippe le Long, roi de France (1316-1322) . Paris: Hachette et cie, 1897.
- Leroquais, Victor. Les Bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, 2 vols. Paris: [Macon, Protat frères, imprimeurs], 1934.
- Lewis, Suzanne. "The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 13096." Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 224-60.
- McKisack, May. The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
- Morand, Kathleen. Jean Pucelle . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
- Nicholas, David. Medieval Flanders . London: Longman, 1992.
- Nirenberg, David. Violence and the persecution of minorities in the Crown of Aragon: Jews, lepers and Muslims before the Black Death. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1993.
- Recueil: "Continuation anonyme de la chronique de Jean de St. Victor" ed. J. D. Guignaut and J. N. de Wailly, in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France 21 (1855)
- Regalado, Nancy Freeman. "Allegories of Power: The Tournament of Vices and Virtues in the Roman de Fauvel." Gesta 32 (1993): 135-46.
- Richard, Jules-Marie. Une Petite-nièce de Saint-Louis: Mahaut comtesse d'Artois et de Bourgogne, 1302-29. Paris: H. Champion, 1887.
- Rois Maudits : Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. L'Art au temps des rois maudits Philippe le Bel et ses fils 1285-1328, (exh. cat.) Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998.
- Rosener, Edward H., François Avril, and Nancy Freeman Regalado, ed., Le Roman de Fauvel in the edition of Mesie Chaillon de Pesstain: A Reproduction in Facsimile of the Complete Manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale fonds français, 146 . New York: Broude, 1990.
- Sheingorn, Pamela. "'The Wise Mother': The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary." Gesta 32 (1993): 69-80.
- Stanton, Anne Rudloff. "Isabella of France and her Manuscripts, 1308-1358," in Capetian Women , ed. Kathleen Nolan and John Carmi Parsons (in press).
- Strayer, Joseph R. The Reign of Phillip the Fair . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
II: Modern and post-modern theories of gender/sexual difference:
- Barrett, Michèle. "Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender." In Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture , ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt. New York: Methuen, 1985.
- Baskins, Cristelle. "Gender Trouble in Italian Renaissance Art History: Two Case Studies." Studies in Iconography 16 (1994): 1-36.
- Baudrillard, Jean. "Fétichisme et Idéologie: La réduction sémiologique." Nouvelle Revue de Psychoalalyse 2 (1970): 213-24. An English version appeared as chapter 3 in Jean Beaudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign . Trans. Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981, 88-101.
- Biddick, Kathleen, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible." In Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism , ed. Nancy F. Partner, 87-116 & 181-188. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1993.
- Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
- Butler, Judith (1991). "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." In Inside/out: Lesbian theories and gay theories , ed. Diana Fuss, 13-31. New York: Routledge, 1991.
- Campioni, Mia and Gross, Elizabeth, "Love's Labours Lost: Marxism and Feminism." In Beyond Marxism? Interventions after Marx , ed. Judith Allen and Paul Patton, 113-41. Leichhardt, N. S. W.: Interventions Publications, 1983.
- Castelli, Elizabeth. "'I Will Make Mary Male': Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity." In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity , ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 29-49. New York: Routledge, 1991.
- Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
- Frye, Marilyn. "The Possibility of Feminist Theory." In Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference , ed. Deborah L. Rhode, 174-84 & 293-94. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
- Flax, Jane. "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory." In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, 39-62, New York: Routledge, 1990. Reprinted in Revising the Word and the World , ed. Vèvè clark, Ruth-EllenB. Joeres, and Madelon Sprengnether, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1993 [first version written in 1984 and published in Signs 12 (1987): 621-43 ].
- Fuss, Diana. "Reading like a Feminist." In The Essential Difference ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, 98-115. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
- Garber, Marjorie. "Spare Parts: The Surgical Construction of Gender." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 1 (1989): 137-59.
- Gatens, Moira, "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction." In Beyond Marxism? Interventions after Marx , ed. Judith Allen and Paul Patton, 143-160. Leichhardt, N. S. W.: Interventions Publications, 1983.
- Heath, Stephen. The Sexual Fix . London: MacMillan Press, 1982.
- Hawkesworth, Mary. "Confounding Gender." Signs 22 (1997): 649-85; with "Comments and Reply" by Wendy McKenna, et al., 686-706.
- Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women . Trans. Anita Barrows. New York: Urizen Books, 1977. Originally published in Paris, 1974.
- Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
- Lauretis, Teresa de. "The violence of rhetoric: Considerations on representation and gender." In The Violence of Representation , ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 239-58. London: Routledge, 1989.
- Mead, Margaret, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies . 3rd. ed. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1963. Originally published, 1935.
- Montrelay, Michèle. L'Ombre et le Nom: Sur la Femininité . Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977, esp. 65-69.
- Montrelay, Michèle. "Inquiry into Femininity." m/f 1 (1988), esp. 88-89.
- Poovey, Mary. "Feminism and Deconstruction," Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 51-64.
- Rhode, Deborah L. "Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference," and "Definitions of Difference." In Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference , ed. Deborah L. Rhode, 1-9 & 263-65, 197- 212 & 294-98. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
- Sanday, Peggy Reeves and Ruth Gallagher Goodenough, ed., Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, c. 1990.
- Scott, Joan W. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." The American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75.
- Smith, Bruce R. "Theories and methodologies: Premodern Sexualities," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115 (2000): 318-29.
- Upin, Jane S. "Applying the Concept of Gender: Unsettled Questions." Hypatia 7 (1992): 180-87.
1 "Preface to the 1950 edition," reprinted in Mead, 1963, i.
2 Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies , ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 217, 226.
3 To avoid misunderstanding, let me clarify right away that I do not mean that men can (yet) be victims of sexual harassment by women, or that so-called reverse discrimination is a social ill comparable to discrimination against the oppressed.
4 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991). See also: Vicki Mahaffey, "Marxist Theory and Criticism," in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism , ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1994), 491-514.
5 Two historical accounts captured the popular imagination of a post-World War II readership: Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978); and Robert E. Lerner, The Age of Adversity: The Fourteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968).
6 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose , trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983). This contrasted William of Baskerville's way of thought, using some of Ockham's words, with the old guard in the monastery who "speak" Suger of Saint-Denis and Joachim of Fiore, and who believe(d) in truth by revelation.
7 Norman E. Rosenthal, Seasons of the Mind (New York: The Guilford Press, 1989).
8 Robert E. Lerner, "Refreshment of the Saints: The Time after Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought," Traditio, 32 (1976): esp. 140-143.
9 Katherine Park and Robert A. Nye, "Destiny is Anatomy: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur," The New Republic 53 (Feb. 1, 1991): 56.
10 Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading 1095-1274 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 71-75, 103-108.
11 Non-representational icons differ in that way; for instance the carpet pages of earlier Hiberno-Saxon books or the geometric patterns of contemporary Islamic work blanket out material distractions and encourage meditation.
12 Statuary of the period scarcely represented these royals differently. For instance, though the founder of the Chapelle of Navarre in the collegiate church of Mantes, perhaps queen Jeanne de Bourgogne about 1330, and the effigy of Clemence of Hungary in Saint-Denis Abbey, are both sculpted in the round they are very heavily draped and their hands are occupied in presenting the chapel, or in prayer: Gerhard Schmidt, "Zu einigen Stifterdarstellungen des 14. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich," in Etudes d'Art médiéval offertes a Louis Grodecki , ed. Sumner Mc K. Crosby et al. (Paris: Editions Ophreys, 1981), 271-72, figs. 3-4 (c.f. the iconic female saint in Mantes, fig 5).
13 The stereotypical images in these French books contrast with a vivid page in the Luttrell Psalter, on which two daughters are depicted helping their father arm and horse for combat (London, British Library, MS Add. 42130, f. 202v): Richard Marks, "Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and Some Companions: Images of Chivalry c. 1320-50," Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 46/47 (1993/4): 343-55, 464-66, has demonstrated the appropriateness of their proximity to Psalms 108 and 109.
14 One of the tormentors of Christ in the Taymouth Hours (f. 119) is black, another has a winged head, to be identified as demonic: Ruth Mellinkoff, "Demonic Winged Headgear," Viator 16 (1985): 367-81.
15 See also: Jane W. Williams, Bread, Wine, & Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
16 Joseph Destrée, "Le Psautier de Guy de Dampierre," Messager des Sciences historiques de Belgique , no. 4 (1890): 377-90; no. 1 (1891): 81-88, 129-32; L. Stijns, "Het Psalter van Gwijde van Dampierre," De Vlaamse Gids 37 (1953): 85-94, had argued for a date ca. 1265-75, but see below for the preferred date.
17 I owe this observation to Ashley West's paper for my seminar at Williams College in 1996.
18 New Haven,Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 229,
f. 126: M. Alison Stones, "Secular Manuscript Illumination in France,"
in Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism ed. Christopher Kleinhenz
(Chapel Hill: U.N.C Department of Romance Languages, 1976), 87, 90, fig.
11 cf. fig 3, with Guillaume kneeling before a lady. A unique copy of
19 The original was attributed to Aristotle; the Flemish title is Heimelicheit der Heimelecheden.
20 This is the preferred date-range argued in the new edtion of C. Gaspar and F. Lyna, Les principaux manuscrits à peintures de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (1937; amplified reprint by C. Van den Bergen-Patens et al., Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale, 1984), Vol. 1, part 1, 219-27; part II, 43 (cf. n. 16 above). The genealogy is given by le Père Anselme, Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la Maison royale de France 3rd. ed. vol 2 (Paris: la Compagnie des Libraires, 1726), 726-33. An additional argument for a terminus ante quem of 1297 is the absence from the calendar of the feast for St. Louis who was canonized then. It must be noted that earlier historians had given quite different dates. According to Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique 1 (Brussels: Henri Lamertin, 1902), 416, Marguerite ceded the title of Flanders to Guy in 1278, and he bought the title of Namur in 1263, ceding it to his son Baudoin in 1297!
21 Destrée, 390 & 81-84, concludes his discussion of the marginalia with the assertion that they would have made the poor burdened Count smile. Delaissé saw them as humorous and rebellious, in the Bakhtinian mode.
22 See also Chronique latine , 403-4. The trial documents have been analyzed and interpreted by Edward J. Martin, The Trial of the Templars (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 65-77. The link between idolatry and homosexuality had been suggested by St. Paul (Romans 1: 22-27), but it was much invoked in the high middle ages, as discussed by Camille, 1989, 90.
23 Montague Summers, trans., The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger (New York: Dover,1971), e.g. 113-14.
24 Brown notes that the Templars affair occupied Philippe le Bel at the same time as Gaveston's infractions. A recent study shows that there is no objective evidence for a homosexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston: Pierre Chaplais, Pieres Gaveston: A Reappraisal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
25 Louis Crompton, "The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791," Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980/81): 17. Sex between Christians and Jews was also punished by death in the Kingdom of Aragon, whereas Muslim-Christian couples were publicly whipped: Nirenberg, 128-65.
26 Armel Diverrès, ed., La chronique métrique attribuée à Geoffroy de Paris. Publications de la Faculté des lettres de l'Uiversité de Strasbourg; Fasc. 129 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956), 202-5, ll. 5868-6070; cf. Chronique latine , I, 404-6, and other sources culled by Lehugeur. A brief account of these events is given by Jean Favier, Philippe le Bel (Paris: Fayard, 1973), 524-29.
27 An illuminated record of the trial of 1336 is preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 18437. See Jean Porcher, Les Manuscrits à peintures en France du XIIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1955), 54-55, pl. XIII.
28 Richard presented her in terms of her magnificent household -- her books (chapter 8), her building works and their decorations (chapters. 19-23). More recently: F. Baron, "Les sculpteurs de Mahaut, contesse d'Artois et de Bourgogne (1302-1329)," 18-22 in Positions des thèses et des mémoires des élèves de l'École du Louvre (Paris: Direction des Musées de France, 1959); Fastes du Gothique , 58-9; J. N. Hillgarth, Raymon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century Framce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 164-70, 180-83.
29 Lucien Fourez, "Le Psautier de Louis le Hutin, 1315," Revue belge d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art , 15 (1945): 101-15.
30 Fourez, "Psautier," 112-13.
31 S. Kimpel, "Margareta (Marina) von Antiochen Jgfr," in Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie , vol 7, ed. Wolfgang Braunfels (Rome: Herder, 1974), col. 494.
32 Fourez, "Psautier," 106, 115.
33 Fourez, "Psautier," 114-15.
34 In addition to the two illustrated, corrections are on ff. 104, 107, 145, 155v, 192r & v, 197, 199, 220v, 235, and 246.
35 Joan Evans, English Art 1307-1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919), 38-39, and Camille 1992, 12.
36 The decorations are described in Le Roman de Fauvel de Gervais du Bus, ed. Arthur L[aring ]ngfors (Paris, 1914-19), ll. 1253-92 and 1315-58. Gillerman, 17 and 200, n. 62, follows older scholarship in associating Fauvel with Enguerrand de Marigny, whereas Rosener et al. see the king himself (Louis le Hutin) as the main target.
37 New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 754, as observed by Gerson (ch. 3 reading list), 49.
38 Horst W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952), 16-20, 29-34, 54-55, 239-46. Caviness 1998, 159, fig. 15.
39 London, British Library, MS Stowe 17, f. 214: Jonathan J. G. Alexander, "Iconography and Ideology: Uncovering Social Meanings in Western Medieval Christian Art," Studies in Iconography 15 (1993): 33, fig. 22.
40 Herman W. Tull, "The Tale of 'The Bride and The Monkey:' Female Insatiability, Male Impotence, and Simian Virility," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1992-93): 574-89.
41 The specific butt of its satire is disputed, and other resonances can be admitted. Gillerman, 17, follows Strayer, 290, and Favier, 290, in preferring Enguerran de Marigny. Such satires were quite common in the period; as late as 1319, Enguerrand seems to have been remembered in Renard le Contrefait , and about 1310, the Edward II and Gaveston affair was satirized in a "Song of the Times": Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages , ed. Evelyn Antal and John Harthan (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1971), 378.
42 See also above, the Norman's stallions in chapter 2.
43 Debra Hassig, "The Iconography of Rejection:
Jews and Other Monstrous Races," in Image
and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the
Index of Christian Art , ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of
Christian Art, 1999), 32, citing commentaries on the
44 Noticed by Camille, 1992, 15, fig. 12.
45 Nancy Regalado, "Allegories of Power: The
Tournament of Vices and Virtues in the
46 I am grateful to Lucy Sandler for confirming this from her examination of the manuscript.
47 Examination of the Peterbrough Psalter was delayed by the curator of manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er because he feared it was too fragile to examine, but arrangements have been made to see it early in 2001.
48 C. Jean Campbell, "Courting, Harlotry, and the Art of Gothic Ivory Carving," Gesta 34 (1995), 11-19, figs. 2-3. I do not agree, however, that some sort of "courtly style" mitigates the crudeness of the subject matter (15-16); I have read the pouched folds at the "lady's" crotch in her fig. 5 as overtly sexual (Caviness 1993, 40, fig. 9).
49 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod. Gall. 16. The ownership and date are confirmed by heraldry, and by the inventory at Isabelle's death in 1368.
50 My tables do not distinguish among the species, nor do I want to assign them particular meanings here, although an owl or a stork has different valences from finches. For the erotic connotations of birds: Louise O. Vasvari, "Fowl Play in My Lady's Chamber: Textual Harassment of a Middle English Pornithological Riddle and Visual Pun," in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages , (Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 4), ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 119-20 with supporting documentation. We still hear "bird" and "birdie" for a female sexual partner, and Italian ucello for male genitals.
51 In the Breviary
of Blanche de France, they cluster round the rubrics for the antiphons
and responsaries; another reason could be as markers to guide the user
back to the text after the singing of these
52 Ucello has the double meaning in Italy of penis.
53 See also the detailed assessment of documentary evidence by Elizabeth A. R. Brown, "Phillip V, Charles IV, and the Jews of France: The Alleged Expulsion of 1322," Speculum 66 (1991); 294-329.
54 Blanche is not named or represented in
the book, but the many shields with the arms of France (often with a kingfisher
nearby), as also those of Artois (
55 Cosimus Stornajolo, Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae codices manu scripti recensiti iussu Pii X Pontificus Maximi: Codices Urbinates Latini , II (Rome: the Vatican, 1912), 130-34, is the only complete description of the text.
56 See Chapter 3, n.31.
57 F. 13 is reproduced in color in Peter Kidson, Medieval World. Landmarks of the World's Art (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), pl. 81.
58 Montague R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Second Series of Fifty Manuscripts (Nos. 51-100) in the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 50-74, no. 57. John Harthan, Books of Hours and their Owners (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 46-49. Members of her household may also be depicted (f. 88).
59 Suzanne Lewis, "The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS Fr. 13096," Art Bulletin 72 (1990), 234, n. 61, was the first to suggest Isabelle was the "patron," a view that is supported by further evidence by Stanton. I am grateful to the author for a manuscript copy of this piece.
60 Among Christian themes are the Apostles Creed with prophets, and New Testament scenes including the adulteress brought before Christ, Mary Magdalen washing his feet and recognizing that he is risen, Salome and John the Baptist, a Passion cycle, and Marianic scenes including the Dormition, funeral, Coronation, and miracles.
61 In fact France was the only European country that had no ruling queens or serious female claimants to the throne throughout the middle ages: Armin Wolf, "Reigning Queens in Medieval Europe: When, Where,and Why," in Medieval Queenship , ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 169-70
62 Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 153-54. Edward II, of course, claimed that his wife could rule France after her brothers. Female rulership was not rejected in England until 1376, when Edward III named his grandson as his heir, overlooking his daughter, Isabelle: Michael Bennett announced a document to the press in July 1997, as yet unpublished.
63 Although there are no heraldic arms or obits in the calendar to confirm Jeanne's ownership, the Hours now in the Cloisters are virtually unanimously accepted as hers, though this has been challenged on the basis of style by Michaela Krieger, "Die 8216;Heures de Jeanne d216;Heures de Jeanne d'Evreux' und das Pucelle-Problem," Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 42 (1989): 101-32. If it was made for another of the six Capetian queens of this generation, this would only slightly alter the date and the age of the recipient.
64 The contrast with other books of the group is very evident in Avril, pls. 3-10 cf. 11-17.
65 Moly Teasdale Smith, "The use of grisaille as Lenten observance," Marsyas 8 (1957-59): 43-54. The grisaille painting of the Passion on silk that is known as the "Parement de Narbonne," with Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon as kneeling donors, is an altar covering for Lent dating from about 1375 (for this see also: Fastes du Gothique , no. 324, 371-73). Many later triptychs have grisaille figures, like unpainted statues, on the outer side of the wings, to be seen during lent.
66 Pucelle or his shop may also have illuminated Gautier de Coincy's Miracles of the Virgin for Charles le Bel in 1327 (the king paid Thomas de Maubeuge who was perhaps a middle-man). In this manuscript (Paris, Biblithèque Nationale, MS n. a. fr. 24541, ff. 237 & 338v) a king and queen kneel before the Virgin and Child, the queen under the prayer ending in display capitals: "et benedictus fructus ventris tui" (and blessed be the fruit of thy womb). Carla Lord, "Thomas de Maubeuge and the Miracles of the Virgin," Source: Notes in the History of Art 8/9 (Summer/Fall 1989): 2-4, has made the case for this identification.
67 Jeffrey M. Hoffeld, "An Image of St. Louis and the Structuring of Devotion," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (February 1971), figs. 1-11, illustrate all these openings.
68 Leroquais, 203, notes that several rubrics
direct the brothers in the liturgy, notably for Good Friday. A
kneeling monk is illustrated in Pl. XXXV. In others of these books, although
Latin often evades the gender of the first person, as we
saw in chapter 1, when prayers are for "us sinners" it distinguishes between
69 Lucy Freeman Sandler, "Jean Pucelle and the Lost Miniatures of the Belleville Breviary," The Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 90-91. This article gives a very thorough discussion of this text, with transcription and translation, and related images, citing earlier bibliography.
70 Frances G. Godwin, "An Illustration to the De Sacramentis of St. Thomas Aquinas," Speculum 26 (1951): 609-14.
71 The illuminator who copied this page in the Breviary of Charles V, MS lat. 1052, f. 245v, understood that this is the key marginal group, and s/he put it at the top of the page, neglecting to copy several other motifs.
72 Genealogies are remarkably hard to establish. My Table 1 (chapter 3) leaves out some children of these last Capetians who died young. Jean Charles Volkmann, Généalogies des rois de France "pour l'histoire" (Paris: Editions Jean-Paul Gisserot, 1997), 53, shows seven children born to Philippe V and Jeanne de Burgogne [d'Artois], including two sons and a daughter who died in infancy; the same source gives Jeanne d'Evreux another daughter, Jeanne (1326-27), and claims that Marie died young
73 L. M. J. Delaissé, J. Marrow, and J. de Wit, The James A. Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: Illuminated Manuscripts (Fribourg: Maison du Livre, 1977), 37-58.
74 Delaissé, Marrow, and de Wit, 48-49, cite Angelus Walz, Compendium Historiae Ordinis Praedicatorum , 2nd. ed. (Rome: Pont. Athenaeum "Angelicum," 1947), 665, to the effect that in 1350 four of the 150 nuns were princesses.
75 Hamburger subsequently argued the case more strongly, but as far as the pictures in the text are concerned, not more convincingly: Jeffrey Hamburger, "The Waddesdon Psalter and the Shop of Jean Pucelle," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 44 (1981): 243-57.
76 Amanda Luyster pointed this out cogently in a term paper in the Women and Art course, Spring 1997.
77 In 1290, after the deaths of three of his sons, Edward I had laid down an order of succession for the English throne that included his daughters (after his surviving son and his daughters). This principle was drastically changed by Edward III in 1376, in a charter that created an entail in the male line: Michael Bennett, "Edward III's Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1376-1471," English Historical Review , 113 (1998): 590-91.
78 For more than a hundred years the kings of both countries had been believed to receive the power to cure scrofula (a skin growth caused by tuberculosis) by the unction at their coronations. The classic study is Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France , trans., J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1973).
79 Hedeman catalogued over fifty manuscripts, but few contain evidence of the original ownership; however, in addition to Jean le Bon, Charles V, Charles VI, Jean de Berry and Jean sans Peur owned extant copies. Only one can be identified with a woman, Jeanne d'Amboise, who may have received it as a wedding gift ca. 1339-41 ( 83, 206, pl. 3).
80 Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le Bon et Charles V (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 8-9.
81 Carla Lord, "Jeanne d'Evreux as a Founder of Chapels: Patronage and Public Piety," in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 21-36, lists this and other possible works, a useful inventory despite the rather odd statement in n. 42 that I had written about "the humor in the Cloisters Hours and the character of Jeanne d'Evreux."
82 Le Trésor de Saint-Denis: Musée du Louvre, Paris, 12 mars-17 juin 1991 (exhibition catalogue), ed. Danielle Gaborit-Chopin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux), 246-54, no. 51.
83 Pressure on her image to collude with patriarchy is clearly seen later, when she is represented in the last stages of pregnancy participating in the discussion concerning the royal succession; it supports the royalist position of the early fifteenth century (Hedeman, 171-73, fig. 120).
84 For the books mentioned in Blanche's will that had belonged to her mother, and most facts of Jeanne's life see: Harthan, Books of Hours , 33, 44.
85 Carla Lord, "Jeanne d'Evreux as a Founder of Chapels," in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs , ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 23-34, provides a well-illustrated catalogue of these donations.
86 Leroquais, I, cxxviii, cxix, 271-74, VI, pls. XXXVII & XXXVIII; Morand, 16-19, 39-40, pls. XV, XVI, XVIIa, b, XXVIIIb.
87 An unusually dramatic example is Mary Magdalen on f. 282v, with four freaks around her.
88 Among few good omens, a trumpeting angel from the Resurrection has spilled over into the Verbum domini on f. 211v, but it is answered on the facing page by a pregnant grotesque blowing a horn; she has bird wings and cloven hooves, and accompanies the prophet Amos in the cattle pasture.
89 Henry Yates Thompson, Thirty-two Miniatures from the Book of Hours of Joan II, Queen of Navarre: A Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century. Roxburghe Club Publication (London: Chiswick Press, 1899). Also, Sydney C. Cockerell in Montague R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Second Series of Fifty MSS. in the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 151-83.
90 Jeanne appears on ff. 65v, 68, 118v, 129v, 136, 136v, 137v, and 151v; she addresses the "humble vierge mere" with all her heart and soul, recalling her "vierge ou saint concèvement, vierge ou saint enfantement" (f. 118v). On f. 151v she names herself: "pro me ancilla tua Joanna navarre regina ..."
91 F.130v: "Je vous cri merci dame gardez moi et de lordure. Et de la puant flamme du pechie de luxure." These prayers begin on f. 129v.
92 On f. 146v; elsewhere St. Nicholas is represented rescuing boys from a murderous innkeeper in the main frame, and saving a poor man's daughters from prostitution at the bottom of the page (f. 193). In the Breviary of Blanche of France (1fr), Nicholas saves the three daughters from prostitution, a suitable choice for a female religious (f. 349v).
93 The calendar pictures are adapted from the Belleville Breviary.
94 Madeline H. Caviness, "Anchoress, Abbess and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?" in Women's Literary and Artistic Patronage in the Middle Ages , ed. June Hall McCash (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), fig. 26 (reprinted in Madeline H. Caviness, Medieval Art in the West and its Audience (Aldershot: Variorum, 2001). cf. Hedeman, fig. 88.
95 F. 149: The framed scenes with St. Giles, and prayers to him, do not seem to have direct bearing on this topic.
96 Reproduced in color by Avril, pl. 15.
97 Jeanne also kneels, at a prie dieu, before the Trinity on f. 11, and below the Magi on f. 55v, but her crown has been erased in both.
98 All the figural illustrations and some of the marginalia were reproduced by Florens Deuchler, "Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg's Prayer Book," and Charles Vaurie, "Birds in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (February 1971): 267-83.
99 Avril, pl. 18B, reproduces these folios in color.
100 Another full-page icon with a prayer addressed to the Wound of Christ figured in Caviness, Visualizing Women , fig. 74.
101 Sydney C. Cockerell, The Book of Hours of Yolande of Flanders: A Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century in the Library of Henry Yates Thompson (London: Chiswick Press, 1905), 7, suggests a "hedgehog bearing off apples on its back" but that is not what I see!
102 Philippe's arms (Navarre and Evreux demidiated, with a label of three points argent) impale those of Flanders (Or a lion rampant sable in a bordure engrailed gules).
103 For her life, see Cockerell, Hours of Yolande , 1-3, who cites: Philippe Emmanuel de Smyttere, Essai historique sur Iolande de Flandre (Lille, 1877). The periods of her life as a widow were turbulent. Before 1353 she had been accused of murder, and of forging the king's coinage and she was excommunicated for sacrilege, and in 1372 her property (including this manuscript) was seized by the king after her arrest and imprisonment.
104 Unfortunately the book was damaged in a flood in London in the nineteenth century, and its subsequent owner Arnold Ruskin gave out the unbound leaves rather liberally (Cockerell, Hours of Yolande, 4-5).
105 The motif depends on a more homely creature carrying two babies in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, f.33r (Caviness 1993, fig. 19), rather than on the nursing mother and grotesque abductor of Jeanne de Navarre's book (fig. 3.43).
106 The graphic artist, Roberta Delaney, who kindly did some of the tabulating of their manuscript for me found it so horrifying she could not finish it. I am nonetheless indebted to her, and for her shared experience which validates my readings.
107 A Colombian group playing in the Boston area in 1990, showed me how they scrape it or rattle the teeth to make a variety of sounds.
108 Marcel Thomas, Les grandes heures de Jean de France, duc de Berry. Introduction et légende (Paris: Draeger frères Vilo, 1971), viii. This is a partial facsimile.
109 Lloyd deMause has commented on the use of fear in the raising of pre-modern children, in "The Evolution of Childhood," in The History of Childhood , ed. Lloyd deMause (New York: The Psychiarty Press, 1974), 1-74, esp. 11. In the fifteenth century Maffio Veggio specified that old maid's tales of monsters and witches carrying off bad children should not be told to boys because they might remain fearful: Maria Walburg Fanning, Maphei Vegii Laudensis De Educatione Liberorum Et Eorum Claris Moribus Libri Sex: A Critical Text of Books I-III (Washington D>C>: The Catholic University of America, 1933), 31-2.
110 I use Smith's definition of aporia (325): "the gap at the point of contradiction between two or more discourses." See also my description of "triangulation" in the Introduction.
111 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion , 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64-6, figs. 67-70.
112 Peter Speed, ed., Those who Fought: An Anthology of Medieval Sources (New York: Italica Press, 1996), 162, who points out that the longbow, introduced into England early in the fourteenth century, necessitated such sites for practice.
113 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3-4, citing Dante, Inferno, cantos XV and XVI, where "sodomites" in hell "are paradoxically accorded great respect and affection," and Boccaccio's witty tale about a "sodomite," Decameron V, 10.
114 Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of her Sex (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Unversity Press, 1997), 204-5, citing Christine de Pisan, Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose , ed. Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1977), 3.4, pp. 717-20.
115 Smith is more interested in queer theory than in feminism, and tends to endorse Foucault's notion of the modern genesis of sexuality. Yet another genealogy, somewhat dismissive of the feminist use of a sex/gender distinction, is that of Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-120.
116 So stated by Stephen R. Graubard, "Preface," to Learning About Women: Gender, Politics, and Power , ed. Jill S. Conway, Susan C. Bourque, and Joan W. Scott (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), vii.
117 She was punished for such destabilizing views. It has been pointed out that she was never invited to speak at Harvard, whereas her male detractors were. The late sexist president of Tufts University, Jean Mayer, delighted in the statement reported from one of her younger male associates, to the effect that he knew he had been in the field long enough if Margaret Mead began to seem sexually attractive to him.
118 The brief passage is of such importance in the history of the idea of gender construction that I will give it in the original here (Baudrillard, "Fétichisme," 222): "nul être n'est 'par nature' assigné à un sexe. . . . Mais cette ambivalence, cette valence sexuelle profonde doit être réduite, car elle échappe comme telle à l'organisation génitale et à l'ordre social. Tout le travail idéologique va consister là aussi à réduire sémiologiquement, à ventiler cette réalité irréductible dans une grande structure distinctive masculin/féminin -- sexes pleins, distincts et opposés l'un à l'autre -- étayée sur l'alibi des organes biologiques (réduction du sexe comme différence à la différence des organes sexuals), et surtout indexés sur de grands modèles culturels qui ont pour fonction de séparer les sexes au privilège absolu de l'un sur l'autre. Si chacun est amené, selon cette structuration dirigée, à se confondre avec son statut sexuel, c'est pour mieux résigner son sexe, c'est-à-dire la différenciation érogène de son propre corps, au profit d'une ségrégation sexualle qui est un des fondements idéologiques et politiques de l'ordre social."
119 Robert Stoller is often cited as the inventor of gender; his contribution is discussed in the Introduction.
120 I owe much of this digest to Jacqueline Rose,
"Introduction II," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the "
121 Among pioneering studies were those published in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); they include a consideration of sex-based dimorphism vs. behaviors in primates (Lila Leibowitz, "Perspectives on the Evolution of Sex Differences," 20-35) and a famous essay on exchange value (Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," 157-210).
122 The separateness of the US development (which includes even the use of the term gender, which does not exist in the same way in e.g. German) is "not a trivial scandal," according to Donna J. Haraway, "'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 129. I am indebted to some facts in her history of the term, but readers may want to read her narrative, which differs considerably from mine in the writers covered. The individual specificity of gender identity has recently been reaffirmed by a practicing clinician: Nancy J. Chodorow, "Gender as a Personal and Cultural Construction," Signs 20 (1995): 516-44.
123 E. Goffman, "Gender advertisements," in Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communications 3 (1976): 65-154.
124 Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," The American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75. Other references for the study of gender in relation to a variety of academic discourses are given in the Introduction above.
125 Annette Kuhn, The power of the image: Essays on representation and sexuality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), esp. chapter 2: "Lawless Seeing," 19-47.
126 Surprisingly, Baudrillard's answer to Marx was not known to these authors.
127 The notion of politically contingent biology was also developed by Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women's Biology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
128 Garber also took Stoller to task for his unequal treatment of matters such as transvestitism, part of the "perversion gap" (143); she probed his case studies for the elusive "male subjectivity" that transsexuals might be supposed (but when?) to have achieved.
129 A full accounting cannot be given here, but together they represent a wide range of academic disciplines, and considerable diversity of opinion. Representation is in part through familiar metonymies: Karen Offen stands for History, Ruth Hubbard for Biology, Nancy Chodorow for Psychoanalysis, Susan Okin for Political Science, Bell Hooks [yes, capitalized] for African-American Studies, Catherine MacKinnon and Rhode herself for Law.
130 A community formed of people who have common goals has been defined, with the help of Sartre, as a serial community: Iris Marion Young, "Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective," Signs 19 (1994): 713-38. "Coalition politics" has also been enlisted as a fluid way of defining women: Linda Nicholson, "Interpreting Gender," Signs 20 (1994): 79-105, with a usefully clear synopsis of recent literature.
131 See also the critique by Park and Nye, summarized in the last chapter.
132 I am referring here to popular attitudes that blame rape victims and unmarried mothers. This is not to say that some modern theories did not ascribe to women the defining characteristic of sexual being, or reproductive sexuality; Butler discusses Monique Wittig among others (111-15).
133 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 238-39; cf. Catherine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
134 There is also a real danger that feminist energy will be depleted in the current debate over essentialism, as pointed out by Jane Roland Martin, "Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Dangerous Traps," Signs 19 (1994): 650-55. I have already heard traditional male scholars label the field as contentious and chaotic (even though the aggressive jockeying for position only mimics the behavior of traditional male-dominated disciplines).
135 Ones I have read about in the press include a study that suggested male offspring are likely to be homosexual if their mother is unduly stressed in pregnancy. My husband, Verne S. Caviness, brought my attention to a report that there is an anatomical difference in the brain that differentiates gays and straight men: Simon LeVay, "A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men," Science 253 (Aug. 30, 1991): 1034-37. The author, who is a gay rights advocate, has since fully discussed the essentialist dilemma: Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Rsearch into Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 2-6, 228-29, 275-81.
136 Fortold by Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
137 Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158 in ch. 6: "Constructing sexual identities in of Robert de Blois' of Robert de Blois' didactic poetry," first published in Paragraph 13 (1990): 105-31. See also chapter 3 here.
138 She had sounded the alarm about essentialism even before Judith Butler: Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).
139 This is also the conclusion reached for the later middle ages, as a consequence of recognizing hermaphroditism, by Cary J. Nederman and Jacqui True, "The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe," Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996), 500.